Cloud Platform Engineer (Kafka Specialist)

**About the company:** PayPay Minato-ku, Tokyo With over 70M million registered users (as of July 2025), PayPay is the country’s most popular mobile wallet used by approximately one out of every two smartphone users in Japan. **Responsibilities:** Provide architecture, development, and operations ownership for Apache Kafka in production (self-hosted and AWS MSK) Deploy, manage and operate high-availability Kafka clusters Improve resilience, scalability and failure-mode readiness of Kafka infrastructure Monitoring and alerting of Kafka for reliability, throughput, and latency Perform broker tuning and partition strategy guidance with production scale in mind Partner with application teams to guide Kafka topic design, schema management, and best practices Contribute to the development of scalable, secure, and observable data pipelines Automate platform and operations workflows using IaC and automation tools Requirements Minimum of 2 years of engineering experience with Apache Kafka in production environments Minimum of 2 years of experience in AWS, Terraform, Ansible and Linux Administration Strong hands-on experience with Kafka cluster operations, including setup, tuning, and maintenance Experience with Kafka authentication and authorization operations Familiarity with AWS cloud platform, especially Amazon MSK (Managed Streaming for Kafka) * We heavily rely on AWS, so those without previous AWS experiences must expect to catch up with it after joining us Proficiency in one or more general-purpose programming languages (e.g., Python, Java, Go) Experience with infrastructure automation and configuration management tools, such as Terraform or Ansible Understanding of modern system design using microservice architecture Working knowledge of Git and CI/CD tools Ability to take ownership, solve problems fast and operate proactively Nice to haves While not specifically required, tell us if you have any of the following. Experience in running and scaling Apache Kafka both self-hosted and in managed cloud environments (e.g., AWS MSK) Experience migrating or operating Kafka in KRaft mode (no ZooKeeper) Experience in data replicate between Kafka clusters, enabling seamless data migration, disaster recovery, and cross-region data synchronization Exposure to Kafka security, including ACLs, TLS, SASL, and IAM-based auth on MSK Strong Knowledge of Kafka internals, including broker tuning, partitioning, replication, and fault tolerance Contributions to Kafka-related open source projects or community involvement Experience with Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, or other stream processing frameworks Experience guiding cross-team adoption of Kafka in microservice architectures Experience in operating distributed systems Working experience in a full remote environment Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree in Computer Science or a related field APPLY FOR THIS POSITION DO YOU NEED MORE INFO? ASK A QUESTION Meet PayPay's Developers Growing your career by asking for you want with Ashwini Meshram Ashwini leads one of PayPay’s payment sub-teams. She got there by doing something she’s done throughout her career: identifying something she wants to do and asking to do it. Read their story... Refactoring PayPay’s Android App with Adrian Mariadas Adrian came to Japan to join PayPay as an Android Engineer. As the app has grown in scope, refactoring the codebase to ensure development can continue at a rapid pace has been a big part of his job. Read their story... iOS Development at PayPay with Yoseph Savianto Yoseph joined PayPay after being attracted to their mission of making Japan a cashless society. As an iOS Engineer, he originally joined their iOS feature team, but now works on their platform team, creating an internal SDK for their iOS and Android apps. Read their story... Rapidly scaling to tens of millions of users with Shilei Long Shilei started working on PayPay before it launched, and has seen it grow into a product used by tens of millions of users. He explains how diversity has helped them overcome challenges, and what PayPay is looking for in candidates. Read their story... **Requirements:** Minimum of 2 years of engineering experience with Apache Kafka in production environments Minimum of 2 years of experience in AWS, Terraform, Ansible and Linux Administration Strong hands-on experience with Kafka cluster operations, including setup, tuning, and maintenance Experience with Kafka authentication and authorization operations Familiarity with AWS cloud platform, especially Amazon MSK (Managed Streaming for Kafka) * We heavily rely on AWS, so those without previous AWS experiences must expect to catch up with it after joining us Proficiency in one or more general-purpose programming languages (e.g., Python, Java, Go) Experience with infrastructure automation and configuration management tools, such as Terraform or Ansible Understanding of modern system design using microservice architecture Working knowledge of Git and CI/CD tools Ability to take ownership, solve problems fast and operate proactively **Nice to have:** While not specifically required, tell us if you have any of the following. Experience in running and scaling Apache Kafka both self-hosted and in managed cloud environments (e.g., AWS MSK) Experience migrating or operating Kafka in KRaft mode (no ZooKeeper) Experience in data replicate between Kafka clusters, enabling seamless data migration, disaster recovery, and cross-region data synchronization Exposure to Kafka security, including ACLs, TLS, SASL, and IAM-based auth on MSK Strong Knowledge of Kafka internals, including broker tuning, partitioning, replication, and fault tolerance Contributions to Kafka-related open source projects or community involvement Experience with Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, or other stream processing frameworks Experience guiding cross-team adoption of Kafka in microservice architectures Experience in operating distributed systems Working experience in a full remote environment Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree in Computer Science or a related field APPLY FOR THIS POSITION DO YOU NEED MORE INFO? ASK A QUESTION Meet PayPay's Developers Growing your career by asking for you want with Ashwini Meshram Ashwini leads one of PayPay’s payment sub-teams. She got there by doing something she’s done throughout her career: identifying something she wants to do and asking to do it. Read their story... Refactoring PayPay’s Android App with Adrian Mariadas Adrian came to Japan to join PayPay as an Android Engineer. As the app has grown in scope, refactoring the codebase to ensure development can continue at a rapid pace has been a big part of his job. Read their story... iOS Development at PayPay with Yoseph Savianto Yoseph joined PayPay after being attracted to their mission of making Japan a cashless society. As an iOS Engineer, he originally joined their iOS feature team, but now works on their platform team, creating an internal SDK for their iOS and Android apps. Read their story... Rapidly scaling to tens of millions of users with Shilei Long Shilei started working on PayPay before it launched, and has seen it grow into a product used by tens of millions of users. He explains how diversity has helped them overcome challenges, and what PayPay is looking for in candidates. Read their story...