Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer

Job Description: Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer

Role Summary

We are looking for an experienced Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer to support the deployment, configuration, administration, and production operations of Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform . The role requires strong hands-on expertise in Kafka, Java, Spring Boot, Linux, security, troubleshooting, and data streaming , with responsibility for maintaining reliable, secure, and highly available Kafka environments.

Position Details

- Job Title: Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer
- Employment Type: Full-Time
- Work Arrangement: Onsite
- Location: Islamabad
- Experience Required: 5 to 10 years
- Education: Minimum Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field

Responsibilities

- Deploy, configure, and maintain Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform across development, UAT, and production environments.
- Support Kafka cluster provisioning, broker configuration, topic creation, partitioning, replication, retention, and capacity management .
- Perform Kafka upgrades, patches, rolling restarts, configuration changes, and cluster expansion with minimal production impact.
- Support deployment of Kafka components such as Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Control Center, and supporting services .
- Troubleshoot production issues involving brokers, partitions, ISR, replication, consumer lag, throughput, latency, storage, and connectivity .
- Manage Kafka security configuration, including TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, certificates, keystores, and truststores .
- Support Java/Spring Boot Kafka application deployments , including producer/consumer configuration and integration troubleshooting.
- Work with application, DevOps, infrastructure, and security teams to onboard new Kafka use cases and promote changes across environments .
- Support CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, configuration management, and release activities for Kafka and Kafka-based applications.
- Perform health checks, capacity planning, performance tuning, incident management, and root-cause analysis .
- Maintain operational documentation, deployment procedures, configuration standards, and recovery/runbook documentation .
- Support high availability, disaster recovery, backup/restore, and multi-cluster replication requirements where applicable.

Must-Have Skills

- Strong hands-on experience with Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform in production .
- Strong knowledge of Kafka architecture, brokers, partitions, replication, ISR, consumer groups, offsets, retention, and delivery semantics .
- Hands-on experience with Kafka deployment, configuration, upgrades, patching, and operational maintenance .
- Strong Java and Spring Boot experience for Kafka producer/consumer integrations.
- Strong Linux, networking, JVM, troubleshooting, and production-support skills.
- Experience with Kafka security , particularly TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, and certificates .
- Confluent Kafka experience.
- Data streaming experience.

Good-to-Have Skills

- Experience with Kubernetes, OpenShift, Anthos, Helm, and containerized Kafka deployments .
- Experience with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and Confluent Control Center .
- CI/CD experience with Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or equivalent .
- Monitoring experience with Splunk, AppDynamics, Prometheus, Grafana, or Confluent monitoring tools .
- Experience with Kafka DR, multi-cluster architectures, replication, and migration activities .
- Experience supporting Kafka in banking, telecom, or other mission-critical environments .