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.

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

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.

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.

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.