Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer

Job Description: Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer

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

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 .