Junior Kafka Engineer

Job Title: Junior Kafka Engineer
Employment Type: Full-Time
Work Arrangement: Onsite
Location: Islamabad
Experience Required: Minimum 3 years
Education: Minimum Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a relevant field

Responsibilities

• Support the deployment, configuration, and maintenance of Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform across development, UAT, and production environments.
• Assist with Kafka cluster provisioning, broker configuration, topic creation, partitioning, replication, retention, and capacity management.
• Support Kafka upgrades, patches, rolling restarts, configuration changes, and cluster expansion under guidance from senior engineers.
• Support Kafka components including Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Confluent Control Center, and related services.
• Monitor and troubleshoot Kafka issues involving brokers, partitions, ISR, replication, consumer lag, throughput, latency, storage, and connectivity.
• Support Kafka security configurations including TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, certificates, keystores, and truststores.
• Assist with Java/Spring Boot Kafka application deployments, including producer and consumer configuration and integration troubleshooting.
• Work with application, DevOps, infrastructure, and security teams to onboard 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 routine health checks, monitoring, performance analysis, incident troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis with support from senior team members.
• Maintain operational documentation, deployment procedures, configuration standards, troubleshooting guides, and runbooks.
• Support high availability, disaster recovery, backup/restore, and multi-cluster replication activities where applicable.
• Participate in production support and assist with resolving Kafka-related incidents.
• Monitor Kafka environments and proactively identify issues related to performance, availability, storage, and consumer lag.

Must-Have Skills

• Minimum 3 years of relevant IT/software engineering experience, with hands-on exposure to Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform.
• Hands-on experience working with Apache Kafka in development or production environments.
• Good understanding of Kafka architecture, including brokers, topics, partitions, replication, ISR, consumer groups, producers, consumers, offsets, retention, and delivery semantics.
• Experience with Kafka deployment, configuration, administration, monitoring, and operational maintenance.
• Hands-on knowledge of Java and Spring Boot, particularly for Kafka producer and consumer integrations.
• Good working knowledge of Linux, networking fundamentals, JVM concepts, troubleshooting, and production support.
• Understanding or hands-on experience with Kafka security, including TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, certificates, keystores, and truststores.
• Experience working with Confluent Kafka / Confluent Platform.
• Understanding of real-time data streaming and event-driven architectures.
• Ability to troubleshoot basic Kafka issues involving consumer lag, broker connectivity, partitions, replication, offsets, and application integrations.

Good-to-Have Skills

• Exposure to Kubernetes, OpenShift, Anthos, Helm, or containerized Kafka deployments.
• Experience or familiarity with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and Confluent Control Center.
• CI/CD exposure using Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or equivalent tools.
• Monitoring experience using tools such as Splunk, AppDynamics, Prometheus, Grafana, or Confluent monitoring tools.
• Understanding of Kafka disaster recovery, multi-cluster architectures, replication, and migration activities.
• Experience working with Kafka in banking, telecom, financial services, or other mission-critical environments.
• Exposure to Docker and containerized applications.
• Basic understanding of capacity planning, performance tuning, and Kafka cluster monitoring.