Apache Kafka Engineer

Posted 27 June 2025
Salary Competitive
LocationBerkshire
Job type Contract
Discipline Software Engineering
Reference73893

Job description

Apache Kafka Engineer

My client is looking for an Senior Apache Kafka Engineer to lead the design, development, and management of our enterprise event streaming platform. This role requires deep Kafka expertise, strong system design skills, and hands-on experience managing large-scale, production-grade deployments.

Key Responsibilities

  • Own and evolve a critical Kafka infrastructure: assess, stabilize, and optimize architecture.

  • Design and implement scalable, event-driven systems across environments (dev, staging, prod).

  • Develop and maintain Kafka clusters, topics, partitions, schemas (Avro), and connectors.

  • Integrate Kafka with external systems and ensure reliability, security, and observability.

  • Troubleshoot delivery issues, latency, consumer lag, and performance bottlenecks.

  • Drive documentation, training, incident resolution, and continuous improvement.

Qualifications

  • 5+ years in software/data engineering, with 3+ years of hands-on Kafka experience.

  • Proven track record managing complex Kafka environments.

  • Strong understanding of Kafka internals (brokers, replication, KRaft/ZooKeeper, ISR).

  • Experience with Kafka Streams, ksqlDB, and building real-time data pipelines.

  • Proficient in Java, Scala, or Python.

  • Familiarity with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and common integrations (DBs, Elasticsearch, cloud).

  • Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and Helm.

  • Cloud Kafka experience (AWS MSK, Confluent, Azure Event Hubs).

  • Skilled with monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, etc.).