Confluent Kafka Platform Architect

Assignment location

Remote

As a Confluent Kafka Platform Architect, you will design and govern the enterprise event streaming platform that powers real-time data movement across the company. You will define architecture patterns, operational guardrails, and integration strategies for Confluent Kafka on cloud infrastructure, enabling secure, scalable, and resilient event-driven capabilities for analytics, AI, and transactional systems.

• Platform Architecture & Design
  • Define and evolve the enterprise Kafka architecture, including cluster sizing, partitioning strategies, replication, and high availability.
  • Establish patterns for producers, consumers, and stream processing applications using Confluent components (Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, kSQLDB).
  • Design multi-region disaster recovery and failover strategies aligned with business continuity requirements.
• Platform Governance & Standards
  • Implement naming conventions, topic lifecycle policies, and schema evolution standards.
  • Define RBAC and security guardrails leveraging Confluent Control Center, ACLs, and encryption (TLS, SASL).
  • Ensure compliance with internal governance and regulatory frameworks.
• Performance & Observability
  • Set up monitoring and alerting for throughput, latency, consumer lag, and broker health using Confluent Control Center and integrated observability tools.
  • Optimize performance for large-scale streaming workloads; tune configurations for reliability and cost efficiency.
• Integration & Enablement
  • Architect connectors for core banking systems, cloud data lakes, and analytics platforms.
  • Provide reusable patterns and onboarding guides for application teams; enable self-service provisioning where appropriate.
  • Collaborate with Info Sec, Cloud Engineering, and Data Governance teams to align platform capabilities with enterprise standards.
• Innovation & Roadmap
  • Evaluate emerging Confluent features and event streaming trends; recommend adoption strategies.
  • Drive automation for provisioning, scaling, and patching using Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Ansible).

Must-Have

• 8+ years in enterprise data architecture or platform engineering roles.
• 4+ years hands‑on experience with Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform in production environments.
• Strong knowledge of event‑driven architecture, schema management (Avro/Protobuf), and stream processing.
• Expertise in security (TLS, SASL, RBAC), performance tuning, and observability for Kafka clusters.
• Familiarity with cloud-native deployments (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and Kubernetes-based Kafka operations.

Preferred

• Experience with hybrid or multi-cloud Kafka deployments.
• Knowledge of financial services compliance and governance requirements.
• Exposure to automation frameworks and CI/CD pipelines for Kafka infrastructure.

System One, and its subsidiaries including Joulé, ALTA IT Services, and Mountain Ltd., are leaders in delivering outsourced services and workforce solutions across North America. We help clients get work done more efficiently and economically, without compromising quality. System One not only serves as a valued partner for our clients, but we offer eligible employees health and welfare benefits coverage options including medical, dental, vision, spending accounts, life insurance, voluntary plans, as well as participation in a 401(k) plan.

System One is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, disability, family care or medical leave status, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.