Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer

We are seeking a highly skilled Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer to manage the deployment, configuration, administration, and production operations of Apache Kafka and the Confluent Platform. The ideal candidate will have extensive hands-on experience with Kafka, Java, Spring Boot, Linux, security, troubleshooting, and data streaming. This role is critical for ensuring the reliability, security, and high availability of Kafka environments within our organization. The position is full-time, onsite in Islamabad, and requires 5 to 10 years of relevant experience along with a minimum of a bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Key Responsibilities

- Deploy, configure, and maintain Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform across development, UAT, and production environments.
- Manage Kafka cluster provisioning, broker configuration, topic creation, partitioning, replication, retention policies, and capacity planning.
- Execute Kafka upgrades, patching, rolling restarts, configuration changes, and cluster expansions with minimal disruption to production.
- Support deployment and maintenance of Kafka components such as Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Control Center, and related services.
- Troubleshoot production issues related to brokers, partitions, ISR, replication, consumer lag, throughput, latency, storage, and connectivity.
- Administer Kafka security configurations including TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, certificates, keystores, and truststores.
- Support Java and Spring Boot Kafka application deployments, including producer and consumer configuration and integration troubleshooting.
- Collaborate with application, DevOps, infrastructure, and security teams to onboard new Kafka use cases and manage environment changes.
- Assist with CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, configuration management, and release activities for Kafka and Kafka-based applications.
- Conduct health checks, capacity planning, performance tuning, incident management, and root cause analysis.
- Maintain operational documentation, deployment procedures, configuration standards, and recovery/runbook documentation.
- Support high availability, disaster recovery, backup/restore, and multi-cluster replication requirements as needed.

Required Qualifications

- Proven hands-on experience with Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform in production environments.
- Deep understanding of Kafka architecture including brokers, partitions, replication, ISR, consumer groups, offsets, retention, and delivery semantics.
- Expertise in Kafka deployment, configuration, upgrades, patching, and operational maintenance.
- Strong proficiency in Java and Spring Boot for Kafka producer and consumer integrations.
- Solid Linux, networking, JVM, troubleshooting, and production support skills.
- Experience with Kafka security mechanisms such as TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, and certificate management.
- Familiarity with Confluent Kafka and data streaming technologies.

Preferred Qualifications and Additional Skills

- Experience with container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, OpenShift, Anthos, and Helm for containerized Kafka deployments.
- Knowledge of Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and Confluent Control Center.
- CI/CD pipeline experience using Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or similar tools.
- Monitoring and observability experience with tools such as Splunk, AppDynamics, Prometheus, Grafana, or Confluent monitoring solutions.
- Exposure to Kafka disaster recovery, multi-cluster architectures, replication, and migration activities.
- Background supporting Kafka in mission-critical industries such as banking or telecommunications.

This role offers an excellent opportunity to lead Kafka initiatives in a dynamic environment, working closely with cross-functional teams to ensure robust and scalable data streaming solutions. If you have a passion for Kafka technology and thrive in a hands-on leadership role, we encourage you to apply.