What are the responsibilities and job description for the Lead Kafka Developer/Admin position at Golden Technology?
Job Summary
We are seeking a Principal Kafka Engineer to lead the management, scaling, and optimization of our enterprise event-streaming ecosystem. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in Apache/Confluent Kafka, applies object-oriented programming principles to advanced automation, and uses ITSM practices to support reliable, high-quality service delivery.
Required Qualifications
Key Responsibilities
We are seeking a Principal Kafka Engineer to lead the management, scaling, and optimization of our enterprise event-streaming ecosystem. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in Apache/Confluent Kafka, applies object-oriented programming principles to advanced automation, and uses ITSM practices to support reliable, high-quality service delivery.
Required Qualifications
- Experience: 3 5 years of Kafka administration experience and 10 years in software development or systems engineering.
- Technical Skills:
- Expertise in Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform, including Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Avro, and KSQL.
- Proficient in Cluster Management - Zookeeper, KRaft
- Strong object-oriented programming skills; Java, Go, Python
- Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or Salt.
- Java backend development experience with Spring Boot.
- Solid understanding of software design patterns.
- Strong knowledge of architecture and design concepts, with the ability to create and maintain architecture artifacts.
- Proficient in containerization technology such as Docker, Kubernetes etc.
- Expertise in DevOps, CI/CD, and GitHub Actions.
- Expertise in Domain Driven Design and Enterprise Application Integration.
- Experience with observability, telemetry, and APM tools such as dynaTrace.
- Good understanding of networking, storage, virtualization, and other infrastructure architecture.
- Self-starter with a goal-oriented mindset.
- Excellent communication, negotiation, and problem-solving skills.
- Expertise in supporting a Highly Available Low Latent Enterprise Application in Production environment(s).
- Experience working with globally distributed team(s).
- Frameworks: Solid understanding of ITSM/ITIL frameworks and Agile methodologies.
- Front-end development experience with Angular, React (preferred), or other TypeScript-based frameworks.
- Expertise in FinOps.
- Experience working in platform teams.
- Cloud provider certifications, such as Azure Certified Solutions Architect.
- Confluent Certified Administrator for Apache Kafka (CCAAK).
- TOGAF
Key Responsibilities
- Kafka Administration: Deploy, configure, and maintain highly available Kafka clusters across on-premises and cloud environments, including Azure and GCP. Manage topics, partitions, and replication to ensure platform reliability.
- OOP-Based Development and Automation: Design and build reusable frameworks, automation tools, and APIs using Java to simplify cluster provisioning, monitoring, and self-service onboarding.
- ITSM Integration: Manage the platform lifecycle through ITSM processes, including incident, problem, and change management, to reduce downtime and maintain SLA compliance.
- Security and Compliance: Implement and maintain security controls and authentication mechanisms.
- Performance Optimization: Monitor cluster health with tools such as dynaTrace, Prometheus, and Grafana. Perform capacity planning and tuning to support high-throughput data pipelines.
- Collaboration: Partner with DevOps and application teams to provide guidance on event-driven architecture and producer/consumer performance best practices.