About the role
Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer
Role Overview
We are seeking a highly skilled Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer to oversee the implementation, administration, and operational support of Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform environments. The ideal candidate will possess strong hands-on expertise in Kafka, Java, Spring Boot, Linux, security, troubleshooting, and data streaming technologies, ensuring the delivery of secure, scalable, and highly available messaging platforms.
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Position Information
* Job Title: Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer * Employment Type: Full-Time * Work Arrangement: Onsite * Location: Islamabad * Experience Required: 5-10 Years * Education: Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline
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Key Responsibilities
* Install, configure, administer, and support Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform across Development, UAT, and Production environments. * Manage Kafka cluster setup, including broker configuration, topic management, partitioning, replication strategies, retention policies, and capacity planning. * Execute Kafka upgrades, patch deployments, rolling restarts, configuration updates, and cluster scaling activities while maintaining production stability. * Deploy and maintain Kafka ecosystem components including Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Control Center, and related services. * Investigate and resolve production issues related to broker performance, partitions, ISR, replication, consumer lag, latency, throughput, storage utilization, and connectivity. * Configure and maintain Kafka security controls, including TLS/mTLS, SASL authentication, ACLs, certificates, keystores, and truststores. * Support and troubleshoot Java/Spring Boot Kafka applications, including producer and consumer integrations. * Collaborate with application, infrastructure, DevOps, and security teams to onboard new Kafka workloads and drive successful environment promotions. * Contribute to CI/CD processes, deployment automation, release management, and configuration control for Kafka platforms and applications. * Conduct regular health monitoring, performance optimization, capacity forecasting, incident response, and root cause analysis activities. * Create and maintain operational documentation, deployment guidelines, configuration standards, disaster recovery procedures, and runbooks. * Support high availability, backup and recovery operations, disaster recovery strategies, and multi-cluster replication architectures where required.
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Required Skills & Experience
* Proven hands-on experience supporting Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform in production environments. * Strong understanding of Kafka architecture, including brokers, partitions, replication, ISR, consumer groups, offsets, retention policies, and delivery guarantees. * Experience with Kafka installation, configuration, upgrades, patch management, and ongoing operational support. * Strong development and integration experience using Java and Spring Boot for Kafka-based applications. * Solid expertise in Linux administration, networking, JVM performance, production troubleshooting, and operational support. * Experience implementing and managing Kafka security, including TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, and certificate management. * Hands-on experience with Confluent Kafka solutions. * Practical experience working with data streaming platforms and real-time event-driven architectures.
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Preferred Skills
* Experience with Kubernetes, OpenShift, Anthos, Helm, and containerized Kafka deployments. * Familiarity with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and Confluent Control Center. * Experience working with CI/CD platforms such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or similar tools. * Monitoring and observability experience using Splunk, AppDynamics, Prometheus, Grafana, or Confluent monitoring solutions. * Knowledge of Kafka disaster recovery (DR), multi-cluster deployments, replication strategies, and migration projects. * Experience supporting Kafka environments within banking, telecommunications, or other business-critical enterprise domains.