Lead Kafka Platform Engineer

Responsibilities

• Lead complex initiatives to design and deliver Confluent Kafka platforms on Open Shift (OCP), enabling scalable, resilient, and secure event streaming solutions for enterprise applications
• Design, build, deploy, and maintain Kafka infrastructure on OCP using operator-based frameworks, supporting components such as brokers, KRaft controllers, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Fink and Control Center
• Drive continuous improvement and modernization efforts, including platform upgrades, automation, and performance optimization across Kafka and OCP environments
• Evaluate and integrate Kafka ecosystem tools and OCP-native capabilities, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture standards and target-state platform design
• Develop and maintain automation frameworks using CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure-as-Code to standardize Kafka cluster provisioning, configuration, and lifecycle management
• Architect and implement high availability and disaster recovery solutions, including cross-data center deployments, replication strategies, and cluster linking for multi-region resilience
• Define and enforce platform governance standards, including naming conventions, topic management, schema governance, security policies, and data isolation strategies
• Analyze and resolve high-impact incidents, performing root cause analysis and implementing corrective actions to improve reliability and prevent recurrence
• Make key technical decisions on Kafka architecture and OCP deployment models, including cluster topology, storage integration, networking, and workload placement
• Establish and manage operational risk and control processes, ensuring compliance with enterprise security, regulatory, and audit requirements
• Optimize platform performance and cost through capacity planning, resource utilization tuning, and workload distribution strategies
• Collaborate with application teams to support onboarding, migration, and adoption of Kafka, enabling self-service capabilities and best practices
• Partner with internal platform teams (OCP, networking, security) and external vendors to drive platform delivery, resolve issues, and influence roadmap priorities

• 5+ years of experience in distributed systems, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering, with a strong focus on event streaming platforms
• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform, including brokers, KRaft/Zookeeper, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, and related ecosystem components
• Strong experience working with container platforms such as Open Shift (OCP) or Kubernetes, including operators, name spaces, networking, and storage integration
• Proven experience designing and operating highly available, multi-node or multi-data-center distributed systems, including replication, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery strategies
• Experience with automation and Infrastructure-as-Code, including CI/CD pipelines, configuration management tools, and declarative deployment models
• Solid understanding of networking, DNS, load balancing, and secure service exposure in containerized environments
• Strong knowledge of security practices, including TLS/mTLS, authentication, authorization (RBAC), and certificate lifecycle management in enterprise environments
• Experience with observability and monitoring tools, including metrics, logging, alerting, and performance tuning of distributed platforms
• Proven ability to troubleshoot complex platform issues, perform root cause analysis, and implement long-term solutions
• Strong understanding of capacity planning, performance optimization, and resource utilization for large-scale platforms
• Experience working in regulated enterprise environments, with knowledge of risk management, controls, and compliance requirements
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work across engineering teams, infrastructure teams, and external vendors.