Kafka DevOps

Job description

Overview: We are looking for Junior DevOps Engineer to take ownership of the Kafka service within our IT ecosystem. The ideal candidate will be responsible for implementing, and maintaining Kafka infrastructure to ensure high availability, scalability, and performance. This role requires initial expertise in Apache Kafka, strong automation skills, and experience managing distributed data streaming platforms in a complex enterprise environment.

Key Responsibilities:

• Kafka Administration & Operations: Deploy, configure, monitor, and maintain Kafka clusters in a high-availability production environment.

• Performance Optimization: Tune Kafka configurations, partitions, replication, and producers/consumers to ensure efficient message streaming.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Automate Kafka infrastructure deployment and management using Terraform, Ansible, or similar tools.

• Monitoring & Incident Management: Implement robust monitoring solutions (e.g., Dynatrace) and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks, latency issues, and failures.

• Security & Compliance: Ensure secure data transmission, access control, and compliance with security best practices (SSL/TLS, RBAC, Kerberos).

• CI/CD & Automation: Integrate Kafka with CI/CD pipelines and automate deployment processes to improve efficiency and reliability.

• Capacity Planning & Scalability: Analyze workloads and plan for horizontal scaling, resource optimization, and failover strategies.

• Collaboration: Work closely with development teams to support Kafka-based applications and ensure seamless data flow.

• Training and technical support to end users and other stakeholders.

Required Skills & Experience:

• 2+ years of experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or Kafka administration.

• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka (setup, tuning, and troubleshooting).

• Proficiency in scripting (Python, Bash) and automation tools (Terraform, Ansible).

• Experience with cloud environments (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and Kubernetes-based Kafka deployments.

• Familiarity with Kafka Connect, KSQL, Schema Registry, Zookeeper.

• Knowledge of logging and monitoring tools (Dynatrace, ELK, Splunk).

• Understanding of networking, security, and access control for Kafka clusters.

• Experience with CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab, ArgoCD).

• Ability to analyze logs, debug issues, and propose proactive improvements.

• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills. An ITIL qualification is an asset;

• Strong communications skills (oral/written) to interact effectively and professionally with both internal and external customers;

• Ability to work in an international/multicultural environment;

• Ability to work both independently and with other team members.

• Knowledge of AWS and kubernetes.

Nice-to-have:

• Experience with Confluent Kafka or other managed Kafka solutions.

• Knowledge of event-driven architectures and stream processing (Flink, Spark, Kafka Streams).

• Experience with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd) for Kafka networking.

• Certifications in Kafka, Kubernetes, or cloud platforms.

Requirements:

• Fluency in English (written and spoken) is required; proficiency in any other European language is a plus.