Kafka Platform Engineer

Kafka Platform Engineer

Solugenix is hiring a Senior Kafka Platform Engineer to manage, enhance, and scale an enterprise‑grade Apache Kafka implementation deployed on AWS and the Confluent Platform.

Irvine, CA (Hybrid) – Full‑Time

US: $75/hour to $90/hour (based on location, experience).

• Manage and enhance existing Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform on AWS.
• Review existing implementations and recommend improvements.
• Collaborate with engineering and product teams to integrate new use cases and define scalable streaming patterns.
• Implement and maintain Kafka producers/consumers, Connectors, and Kafka Streams applications.
• Enforce governance around topic design, schema evolution, partitioning, and data retention.
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and tune Kafka clusters using Confluent Control Center, Prometheus, and Grafana.
• Use Kubernetes and Terraform to automate Kafka infrastructure deployment and scaling.
• Ensure high availability, security and disaster recovery.
• Mentor other engineers and provide leadership in Kafka‑related initiatives.

• 8+ years in platform engineering with 3+ years hands‑on experience with Apache Kafka.
• Proficiency in Kafka client development using Java or Python.
• Expertise with Confluent Platform components.
• Experience deploying and managing Kafka on AWS (MSK or self‑managed EC2).
• Solid understanding of Kubernetes (EKS) for microservices integration.
• Hands‑on experience with Kafka Connect, Streams, and schema management.
• Infrastructure automation experience with Terraform and Helm.
• Monitoring and alerting stack experience:
  Prometheus, Grafana, ELK.

• Experience in Fin Tech or regulated industries.
• Security best practices (TLS, SASL, OAuth, RBAC, encryption).
• Exposure to stream processing engines:
  Flink, Spark Streaming.
• Kafka governance frameworks and multi‑tenant topic strategies.
• Confluent Kafka, Terraform, Kubernetes, EKS must‑have.
• Kafka Certification nice to have.

Solugenix will consider qualified applicants with a criminal history pursuant to the California Fair Chance Act and Ordinance. Applicants do not need to disclose their criminal history until a conditional job offer is made.

Our client is an American financial services company, one of the world’s oldest and largest investment management organizations.