Job Summary
We are seeking an experienced Kafka Platform Engineer with strong expertise in Confluent Kafka Platform across on-premises and cloud environments. The role will focus on designing secure, highly available Kafka architectures, supporting enterprise data streaming and integration, automating platform operations, and resolving complex production issues. The engineer will also leverage AI-powered development tools and build AI-driven agents and workflows to improve engineering productivity, operational efficiency, and software delivery.

Key Responsibilities
• Design and implement secure Kafka architectures, including authentication, authorization, encryption, and network isolation.
• Define and support high availability, disaster recovery, and data replication strategies.
• Ensure Kafka platforms align with enterprise security, compliance, and governance standards.
• Advise on data ingestion, event streaming, batch and stream processing architectures.
• Provide guidance on data modeling and serialization standards, including Avro, Protobuf, and JSON Schema.
• Support enterprise integration use cases and resolve complex Kafka-related integration challenges.
• Design and build AI agents, custom skills, or equivalent frameworks to automate engineering and operational workflows.
• Leverage AI-powered tools such as GitHub Copilot and AI agents to accelerate development, automate testing, improve code quality, and enable intelligent SDLC workflows.
• Design agentic workflows and multi-agent orchestration patterns to address distributed systems, integration, and operational challenges.
• Apply advanced prompt engineering and integrate AI-assisted development tools into engineering workflows.
• Drive automation-first operations using Python, Ansible, and scripting.
• Build and maintain self-service operational tools to reduce day-to-day support overhead.
• Integrate Kafka platform operations with DevOps and CI/CD tooling such as Azure, Jenkins, Puppet, and Chef.
• Lead deep-dive investigations into complex production issues and outages.
• Perform root cause analysis, document findings, and drive remediation through completion.
• Support high-pressure outage and incident management activities.
• Act as a technical advisor to engineering, operations, and leadership teams.
• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams and vendors.

Required Qualifications
• 10+ years of experience in distributed systems, messaging, and enterprise platform engineering.
• Extensive hands-on experience with Confluent Kafka Platform in both on-premises and cloud environments.
• Strong experience designing and supporting secure Kafka architectures, including authentication, authorization, encryption, and network isolation.
• Experience with high availability, disaster recovery, and Kafka data replication strategies.
• Strong background in Linux/Unix environments, networking, operating system performance, and security.
• Proven experience with automation, DevOps, and operational tooling.
• Experience using AI-powered tools to accelerate development and improve engineering productivity and efficiency.
• Hands-on experience with GitHub Copilot or similar AI-assisted development tools.
• Experience building or implementing AI-driven agents, workflows, or automation solutions.
• Strong experience with Kafka data streaming, integration, and enterprise messaging architectures.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Strong organizational, relationship management, and teamwork skills.

Preferred Qualifications
• Confluent Kafka or cloud certifications.
• Prior experience supporting large-scale, regulated enterprise environments.