The role focuses on Apache Kafka, HiveMQ, Kubernetes, platform stability, automation, self-service, security, and end-to-end operational ownership. You will be responsible for designing and maintaining highly available messaging platforms, automating operational processes, improving observability, and ensuring reliable and scalable platform performance.
The position is primarily platform-focused rather than application-development focused, although you will collaborate closely with development teams and may contribute to customer projects when required.
Design, deploy, operate, and maintain multi-cluster and multi-region Apache Kafka environments running on Kubernetes, using Strimzi Operator or similar technologies.
Administer and maintain enterprise HiveMQ MQTT broker environments.
Drive the upgrade lifecycle for Kafka, Strimzi, and HiveMQ, including minor and major version upgrades and security patching.
Coordinate platform patching activities to mitigate vulnerabilities while maintaining application availability.
Develop and maintain custom Kafka Connect Source and Sink connectors for data integration between legacy systems and cloud environments.
Define and implement Kafka scaling strategies, node affinity, topology spread constraints, and persistent volume configurations for I/O-intensive workloads.
Manage Kafka broker partition layouts, topic configurations, compaction, retention, segmentation, and cluster-wide resource allocation.
Design and implement high-availability and disaster-recovery solutions, including cross-region replication and automated failover.
Manage and enforce data governance using Schema Registry, including Avro, Protobuf, and JSON Schema.
Design messaging traffic routing through ingress and edge technologies such as Envoy Gateway or custom proxies.
Implement Kafka security controls including ACLs, SASL authentication, RBAC, OAuth/OIDC, and API management integrations.
Implement and maintain security mechanisms such as mTLS, SSL/TLS, SASL/SCRAM, and certificate-based authentication.
Build and maintain observability solutions using Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, Fluent Bit, and/or OpenTelemetry.
Create dashboards and monitoring solutions for key Kafka and infrastructure KPIs.
Develop proactive alerting for issues such as Kubernetes node failures, JVM memory degradation, disk capacity thresholds, storage problems, consumer lag, and other cluster anomalies.
Perform Root Cause Analysis (RCA) following platform incidents and implement preventive measures and automated guardrails.
Provide Tier 3 support for complex Kafka and integration issues, including consumer lag, rebalance loops, performance issues, and network bottlenecks.
Act as a technical subject matter expert for development teams working with Java and Spring Boot, advising on Kafka Producer/Consumer configurations, idempotency, acknowledgements, batching, schemas, and performance.
Ensure platform stability, scalability, performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.
Build and maintain reusable GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines for validating, testing, linting, and deploying infrastructure and Kafka-related configurations.
Implement event-driven application scaling using technologies such as KEDA, based on Kafka lag and throughput metrics.
Apply Infrastructure as Code principles using Helm, Terraform, and related tooling.
Package and manage reusable Helm resources and OCI artifacts.
Build developer self-service capabilities allowing teams to safely provision topics, schemas, credentials, and other messaging resources within defined architectural and security guardrails.
Maintain clear technical documentation, READMEs, and operational procedures.
Handle platform-level incident, problem, and change management.
Collaborate closely with Security, Architecture, Infrastructure, and Software Development teams.
