Senior Infrastructure Kafka Engineer

Role: Senior Infrastructure Kafka Engineer

Location: Phoenix, AZ- Onsite

Employment type: contract-to-hire

Role Overview

Client is seeking a Senior Infrastructure Kafka Engineer to join the Enterprise Data Engineering team. This role is ideal for a seasoned engineer with deep experience in Apache Kafka / Confluent Kafka, messaging (MQ), SQL/NoSQL databases, and cloud infrastructure, who can lead operations and engineering for a large-scale, event-driven data platform.

You will lead Kafka platform operations and automation, integrate Kafka with core banking systems, and provide senior-level support across a broad technology stack to enable real-time data and analytics use cases across the bank.

Key Responsibilities

Platform & Infrastructure Engineering

• Administer, configure, and troubleshoot Kafka clusters (on-prem and cloud), including broker/cluster configuration, partitioning, and performance tuning.
• Design and implement scalable, highly available Kafka infrastructure, including disaster recovery and multi-environment strategies.
• Integrate Kafka with upstream/downstream systems via Kafka Connect and other connectors (e.g., MQ, MongoDB, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL).
• Build and support real-time data pipelines using Kafka producers and streaming consumers (e.g., Spark Streaming, Kafka Streams).
• Automate infrastructure provisioning and configuration across environments using Terraform and modern DevOps practices.
• Deploy and manage Kafka components and clients in production and DR environments, ensuring resilience and recoverability.

Operations, Observability & Support

• Lead a small team of engineers/technicians in event-based monitoring, diagnosis, and remediation of infrastructure issues.
• Implement and maintain comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting using tools such as Splunk, Datadog, Grafana, and related observability platforms.
• Perform proactive health checks and capacity planning to identify issues before they impact service.
• Serve as a primary point of contact for daily operations, major incidents, and escalations related to Kafka and related infrastructure.
• Develop, maintain, and continuously improve runbooks and playbooks for incident response, maintenance, and common operational tasks.
• Analyze and audit support tickets to identify patterns, reduce downtime, and drive problem management and root-cause fixes.

Governance, Compliance & Collaboration

• Ensure infrastructure and platform changes comply with internal standards, regulatory requirements, and security policies.
• Collaborate with security, networking, application, and data engineering teams to design and operate secure, compliant, event-driven architectures.
• Contribute to standards, best practices, and documentation for Kafka, messaging, and integration patterns across Enterprise Data Engineering.
• Participate in and help drive agile ceremonies; influence product/technical direction for streaming and integration platforms.

Required Qualifications

• 7 years of experience in infrastructure engineering with a strong focus on:
• Kafka administration (on-prem and cloud) and Kafka ecosystem (brokers, topics, consumer groups, replication, failover).
• Messaging systems (e.g., MQ) and database integration (SQL and NoSQL).
• Proven experience designing, deploying, and scaling Kafka clusters and connector infrastructure in production and DR environments.
• Hands-on experience building real-time data pipelines using Kafka producers and streaming consumers (e.g., Spark Streaming).
• Strong proficiency with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Azure) and event-driven architectures, including containerization and DevOps practices.
• Experience with monitoring/observability tools such as Splunk, Datadog, Grafana.
• Solid understanding of networking, operating systems (Linux/Windows), and core diagnostic tools.
• Proficiency with source control (SVN, Git) and scripting/programming (e.g., PowerShell, Bash, Python, Perl).
• Demonstrated ability to analyze complex issues, make sound decisions with limited information, and drive issues to resolution.
• Strong communication, customer service, and collaboration skills; comfortable working with cross-functional technical teams.

Desired Qualifications

• Prior experience with enterprise monitoring tools beyond those listed.
• Financial services industry experience, ideally within a regulated banking environment.

Education

• Bachelor s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electronics Engineering, or equivalent professional experience.