Kafka Support Specialist

As a Kafka Support Specialist, you will join the Enterprise Event Streaming team responsible for supporting, monitoring, and maintaining high-throughput, mission-critical streaming architectures.

In this role, you will play a key part in maintaining the health and resilience of the event-driven infrastructure, ensuring high availability, performance, and operational consistency across Enterprise Event Streaming pipelines powered by Confluent Kafka.

Key Responsibilities

• Production Support & Incident Management: Provide Tier 1 / Tier 2 production support for enterprise event streaming platforms, including real-time incident diagnosis, resolution, and root cause analysis (RCA).
• Kafka Operations & Maintenance: Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize Confluent Kafka clusters, brokers, schemas, producers, and consumer applications across distributed environments.
• Consumer & Producer Troubleshooting: Assist application teams with configuring, debugging, and optimizing Kafka Consumers and Producers, ensuring standard delivery patterns and robust error-handling mechanisms (e.g., dead-letter queues, retry topics).
• Platform Monitoring & Reliability: Monitor pipeline latency, consumer lag, cluster throughput, and system health using enterprise observability and alerting tools (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, Splunk).
• Change Management & Deployment: Support release management, application deployments, configuration updates, and infrastructure upgrades across production and non-production environments following ITIL/Agile processes.
• Collaboration & Onboarding: Work closely with engineering and development teams to onboard new data pipelines, establish operational best practices, and maintain reliable data flow across business units.

Key Qualifications

• Experience: 2+ years of experience in production support, or focused on enterprise data streaming platforms.
• Event Streaming Expertise: Hands-on experience with the Confluent Kafka ecosystem, including Kafka Brokers, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, and Kafka Streams.
• Kafka Producers & Consumers: Deep understanding of Kafka Producer and Consumer architecture, offset management, partitioning strategies, serialization/deserialization (Avro, JSON, Protobuf), and delivery guarantees.
• Monitoring & Observability: Strong experience leveraging observability stacks to track consumer lag, identify bottleneck issues, and detect broker anomalies.
• Scripting & Automation: Proficiency in shell scripting (Bash) and Python (or Java/Scala) to automate routine support tasks, health checks, and monitoring scripts.
• Operating Systems & Infrastructure: Solid background in Linux/Unix environments, network troubleshooting, and enterprise security standards (SSL/TLS, SASL, Kerberos).