Role Summary
The Senior Kafka Administrator / Developer
will design, build, operate and improve enterprise Kafka and event-streaming
platforms across AWS and Kubernetes, including Amazon EKS. The role requires
strong hands-on Kafka administration, integration development, cloud-native
operations and production support experience.
The role works closely with application,
integration, cloud, security and operations teams to deliver reliable
event-driven solutions, resolve complex issues, automate repeatable tasks and
support platform lifecycle, governance and service improvement activities.
Key Responsibilities
· Administer and support Kafka
platforms, including brokers, topics, partitions, replication, consumer groups,
Kafka Connect, Schema Registry and related services.
· Design and develop Kafka
producers, consumers, stream-processing components and reusable integration
patterns using Java, Spring Boot, Python or similar technologies.
· Deploy, operate and improve
Kafka and supporting components on Kubernetes and Amazon EKS using Helm, CI/CD,
GitOps and approved cloud-native patterns.
· Manage platform reliability,
resilience, capacity, performance, patching, upgrades, backup, recovery and
lifecycle activities across production and non-production environments.
· Troubleshoot complex issues
across applications, brokers, connectors, schemas, networking, storage,
certificates and cloud infrastructure.
· Implement monitoring, alerting
and dashboards for broker health, throughput, latency, replication, disk usage,
consumer lag and connector health.
· Apply security and governance
controls, including TLS, authentication, authorisation, ACLs, secrets,
certificates, least-privilege access and vulnerability remediation.
· Support incidents, problems,
changes and releases, including root-cause analysis, runbook improvement and
automation of recurring operational tasks.
· Guide application teams on
topic design, partitioning, message contracts, schema evolution, retries,
dead-letter handling, idempotency and supportability.
· Maintain architecture,
configuration, operational, recovery and support documentation.
Technical Leadership
· Act as the senior technical
point of contact for Kafka platform design, engineering and operational
matters.
· Mentor engineers, review
technical work and promote consistent engineering and operational standards.
· Lead planning for upgrades,
migrations, resilience improvements and platform modernisation.
· Communicate risks,
dependencies, options and recommendations clearly to technical and business
stakeholders.
Key Skills & Experience
Technical Experience
· Strong hands-on experience
administering Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform in complex enterprise
environments.
· Solid understanding of Kafka
brokers, topics, partitions, replication, consumer groups, Kafka Connect,
Schema Registry and MirrorMaker.
· Experience developing Kafka
producers, consumers and integration services using Java, Spring Boot, Python
or equivalent technologies.
· Hands-on experience with
Kubernetes and Amazon EKS, including Docker, Helm, storage, networking,
ingress, secrets and identity integration.
· Working knowledge of AWS
services such as EKS, EC2, S3, IAM, CloudWatch, Route 53 and core networking
services.
· Experience with CI/CD, GitOps
and Infrastructure as Code tools such as Jenkins, Argo CD, Terraform or
CloudFormation.
· Strong Linux, networking, TLS,
DNS, certificate and distributed-systems troubleshooting capability.
· Experience with observability
tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, Dynatrace, Splunk or equivalent.
Preferred Qualifications
- Degree in Information Technology, Engineering, Computer
Science, or related discipline.
- AWS, Azure, ITIL, Kubernetes, Database, or relevant technology
certifications.
- Experience managing large-scale enterprise or government
technology environments.
- Experience with hybrid cloud, platform
modernization, and operational transformation programs.
