Junior Kafka Engineer

We are seeking a Junior Kafka Engineer to join our team on a full-time basis at our Islamabad office. The ideal candidate will have a minimum of three years of experience working with Apache Kafka and the Confluent Platform, supporting deployment, configuration, and maintenance across various environments. This role requires a strong foundation in Kafka architecture, operational support, and integration with Java/Spring Boot applications. The position is onsite and involves collaboration with cross-functional teams to ensure smooth Kafka operations and continuous improvement.

Key Responsibilities

- Support the deployment, configuration, and maintenance of Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform in development, UAT, and production environments.
- Assist with Kafka cluster provisioning, broker configuration, topic management including partitioning, replication, retention, and capacity planning.
- Support Kafka upgrades, patches, rolling restarts, configuration changes, and cluster expansion under the guidance of senior engineers.
- Manage Kafka components such as Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, and Confluent Control Center.
- Monitor and troubleshoot Kafka-related issues including brokers, partitions, ISR, replication, consumer lag, throughput, latency, storage, and connectivity.
- Implement and support Kafka security configurations including TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, certificates, keystores, and truststores.
- Assist with Java/Spring Boot Kafka application deployments, including producer and consumer configuration and integration troubleshooting.
- Collaborate with application, DevOps, infrastructure, and security teams to onboard Kafka use cases and manage changes across environments.
- Support CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, configuration management, and release activities for Kafka and Kafka-based applications.
- Perform routine health checks, monitoring, performance analysis, incident troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis with senior team support.
- Maintain operational documentation, deployment procedures, configuration standards, troubleshooting guides, and runbooks.
- Support high availability, disaster recovery, backup/restore, and multi-cluster replication activities as needed.
- Participate in production support and assist with resolving Kafka-related incidents.
- Proactively monitor Kafka environments to identify and resolve performance, availability, storage, and consumer lag issues.

Required Qualifications

- Minimum of 3 years of relevant IT or software engineering experience with hands-on exposure to Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform.
- Practical experience working with Apache Kafka in development or production environments.
- Strong understanding of Kafka architecture including brokers, topics, partitions, replication, ISR, consumer groups, producers, consumers, offsets, retention policies, and delivery semantics.
- Experience in Kafka deployment, configuration, administration, monitoring, and operational maintenance.
- Hands-on knowledge of Java and Spring Boot, particularly for Kafka producer and consumer integrations.
- Proficiency in Linux, networking fundamentals, JVM concepts, troubleshooting, and production support.
- Familiarity with Kafka security mechanisms such as TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, certificates, keystores, and truststores.
- Experience with Confluent Kafka and Confluent Platform.
- Understanding of real-time data streaming and event-driven architectures.
- Ability to troubleshoot common Kafka issues including consumer lag, broker connectivity, partitions, replication, offsets, and application integration challenges.

Preferred Qualifications and Additional Skills

- Exposure to Kubernetes, OpenShift, Anthos, Helm, or containerized Kafka deployments.
- Experience or familiarity with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and Confluent Control Center.
- Knowledge of CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or equivalents.
- Experience with monitoring tools like Splunk, AppDynamics, Prometheus, Grafana, or Confluent monitoring solutions.
- Understanding of Kafka disaster recovery, multi-cluster architectures, replication, and migration activities.
- Experience working with Kafka in mission-critical sectors such as banking, telecom, or financial services.
- Exposure to Docker and containerized applications.
- Basic knowledge of capacity planning, performance tuning, and Kafka cluster monitoring.

This role offers the opportunity to work in a dynamic environment with a focus on real-time data streaming technologies, supporting critical enterprise applications. Candidates who are proactive, detail-oriented, and eager to develop their Kafka expertise will thrive in this position.