Cloud Platform Engineer (Kafka Specialist)

We are looking for someone who is not only hands-on with Kafka internals, but also confident operating it at scale in production environments that is processing millions of payments daily for 70M+ users. At the core of our architecture is Apache Kafka. As we continue to scale, we’re: - Migrating our self-hosted Kafka clusters to KRaft mode - Operating Kafka across both self-managed environments and AWS MSK - Strengthening reliability, security, and observability - Driving deeper adoption of a truly event-driven architecture Main Responsibilities Tech leadership, architecture, development, and operations for Apache Kafka, including both self-hosted clusters and AWS MSK Ensure deployment, management, and smooth operation of highly available Kafka infrastructure Monitoring and alerting of Kafka for reliability, throughput, and latency Performance tuning and instrumentation of Kafka clusters and pipelines 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 infrastructure and operations workflows using infrastructure-as-code tools Tech Stack Java, Python, Go Kafka, Elasticsearch/Opensearch, AWS MSK, Athena, Glue Docker, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Argo rollouts, Argo workflows, Artifactory, AWS, GCP GitHub, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Terraform, Ansible, Microservices, GitOps Logstash, Fluent-bit, Vector, Victoria Metrics, Grafana, Prometheus Slack, Zoom, Confluence, JIRA Qualifications Minimum of 3 years of engineering experience with Apache Kafka in production environments Minimum of 3 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 Preferred Qualifications Deep expertise 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 Deep expertise in 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