Kafka Technical Lead/Senior Kafka Engineer

Job Requirements:

• 7+ years of software and integration engineering experience.
• 4+ years of Apache Kafka platform engineering experience.
• Strong expertise in distributed systems, cloud platforms, Kubernetes, DevOps, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, Schema Registry, and enterprise security implementations.

Key Responsibilities:

Architecture & Design

• Define enterprise Kafka architecture standards and best practices.
• Design multi-cluster, highly available, and disaster recovery capable Kafka environments.
• Establish topic design strategies, retention policies, partitioning models, and replication standards.
• Lead integration patterns leveraging Kafka, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and stream processing technologies.

Technical Leadership

• Provide technical guidance and mentoring to mid-level engineers.
• Conduct architecture reviews and design governance.
• Drive platform modernization and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Collaborate with enterprise architects, application teams, security teams, and infrastructure teams.

Platform Engineering

• Design and optimize Kafka cluster capacity and performance.
• Implement monitoring, observability, security, and governance controls.
• Troubleshoot critical production incidents and performance bottlenecks.
• Manage platform upgrades, migrations, and resilience testing.

Security & Compliance

• Establish authentication, authorization, encryption, and audit standards.
• Ensure compliance with enterprise security and data governance requirements.