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 .