Lead Kafka Engineer

Senior Kafka Engineer / Kafka Lead

We are seeking a Senior Kafka Engineer with proven leadership experience who remains technically hands-on. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in Confluent Kafka, capable of both addressing complex platform-level issues and guiding teams with best practices. You will play a key role in architecting, maintaining, and optimizing Kafka infrastructure while mentoring developers and collaborating across teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead Kafka platform initiatives, ensuring high availability and performance.
• Manage and maintain Confluent Kafka clusters in production.
• Troubleshoot and resolve platform-level issues quickly and effectively.
• Provide technical leadership and mentoring to developers and junior engineers.
• Define and enforce Kafka best practices, design patterns, and operational standards.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate Kafka seamlessly with other systems.
• Drive improvements in monitoring, alerting, and Kafka observability.

Qualifications

• Extensive hands-on experience with Confluent Kafka and Kafka ecosystem tools.
• Strong understanding of Kafka internals, architecture, replication, and partitioning strategies.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical initiatives and mentor others.
• Proficiency in troubleshooting Kafka performance and availability issues.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Ability to work onsite in a collaborative environment.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with other messaging systems (e.g., RabbitMQ, Pulsar).
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Exposure to DevOps practices and automation tools (e.g., Ansible, Terraform)