Senior Platform & Integration Engineer; Kafka

Senior Platform & Integration Engineer

Medica is a nonprofit health plan with more than a million members that serves communities in Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Missouri, and beyond. We deliver personalized health care experiences and partner closely with providers to ensure members are genuinely cared for.

We're a team that owns our work with accountability, makes data-driven decisions, embraces continuous learning, and celebrates collaboration - because success is a team sport. It's our mission to be there in the moments that matter most for our members and employees. Join us in creating a community of connected care, where coordinated, quality service is the norm, and every member feels valued.

Defining problems, conducting and narrowing research, analyzing criteria, finding, analyzing and applying solutions. Performs other duties as assigned.

This role is ideal for someone who:

• Is a platform-focused engineer with deep expertise in event-driven architectures, cloud-native technologies, and integration platforms.
• Has extensive hands-on experience administering and supporting Kafka across both on-premises environments and Confluent Cloud.
• Excels at designing, building, and operating scalable platforms that enable real-time data processing and microservices orchestration.
• Leads technical initiatives through influence, collaboration, and engineering excellence.
• Driving platform reliability, automation, observability, and operational maturity across engineering teams.
• Balances platform architecture, operational excellence, automation, mentoring, and strategic technology planning.

You will work closely with engineering leadership, application development teams, cloud and security teams, infrastructure teams, and enterprise architects to build and evolve Medica's integration and platform capabilities. Performs other duties as assigned.

• Administer, support, and optimize Kafka platforms across both on-premises environments and Confluent Cloud, ensuring high availability, security, monitoring, and efficient event-streaming capabilities.
• Manage and maintain Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Kubernetes platforms, including cluster administration, networking, ingress management, RBAC, autoscaling, secrets management, and platform security.
• Serve as an Azure Cloud Administrator responsible for managing Azure services, resolving infrastructure and network connectivity issues, and supporting development teams with Azure resource provisioning, deployment, and configuration.
• Design, develop, and maintain robust CI/CD pipelines utilizing Azure Dev Ops and Git Hub Actions to streamline software delivery and platform operations.
• Drive automation initiatives through scripting and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices to improve provisioning, deployment, and operational efficiency.
• Implement and enhance observability and monitoring solutions using Splunk, Dynatrace, Prometheus, and Grafana to ensure platform reliability, availability, and performance.
• Lead incident management activities, including troubleshooting, root cause analysis, problem resolution, and continuous service improvement efforts.
• Establish and enforce platform governance, operational standards, security controls, and best practices across cloud and integration platforms.
• Provide technical guidance, and mentorship in Kafka, Kubernetes, Azure, and Dev Ops technologies.
• Collaborate closely with application, infrastructure, security, and enterprise architecture teams to advance cloud modernization, platform engineering, and digital transformation initiatives.

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in related field
• 5 years of work experience beyond degree
• 5+ years of in platform engineering, cloud operations, or enterprise integration.
• Hands-on expertise with Kafka, Confluent Cloud, AKS/Kubernetes, Azure, Azure Dev Ops, and Git Hub Actions.
• Experience with Azure resource management, cloud deployments, and network troubleshooting.
• Strong scripting and automation skills (Power Shell, Bash, Python).
• Experience with containerization, distributed systems, and deployment strategies.

• Kafka administration,…