We are seeking an experienced Technology Specialist – Kafka to design, administer, automate, secure, and optimise enterprise Kafka platforms supporting mission-critical banking applications.This role is responsible for ensuring the stability, scalability, resilience, and security of Kafka environments while driving automation, DevOps best practices, and cloud adoption.The successful candidate will combine deep Kafka platform engineering expertise with Linux administration, Infrastructure-as-Code, observability, and cloud engineering to deliver highly available event streaming infrastructure that supports modern banking systems and real-time data integration.Key ResponsibilitiesKafka Platform Administration
Install, configure, upgrade, patch and maintain enterprise Kafka clusters.
Administer Confluent Platform and/or Confluent Cloud environments.
Manage brokers, topics, partitions, replication and consumer groups.
Optimise Kafka cluster performance, throughput and latency.
Perform capacity planning and scaling of Kafka infrastructure.
Troubleshoot broker failures, replication issues and performance bottlenecks.
Support production incidents and perform root cause analysis.
Design highly available Kafka platforms across multiple environments.
Implement resilient architectures for business-critical messaging workloads.
Configure multi-broker clusters with appropriate replication and fault tolerance.
Support disaster recovery and high availability strategies.
Maintain platform documentation and operational runbooks.
Infrastructure as Code
Platform provisioning
Automated deployments
Configuration management
CI/CD integration
Environment standardisation
Terraform
Ansible
Python
Bash
Azure DevOps
Git
Performance tuning
Storage optimisation
Network troubleshooting
Service management
Operating system maintenance
Capacity management
Log analysis
TLS/SSL encryption
SASL authentication
ACL administration
Certificate lifecycle management
Identity integration
Secure client connectivity
Compliance with enterprise security standards
Azure networking
Virtual Machines
Managed services
Storage
Identity integration
Hybrid deployments
Cloud security
Platform optimisation
Health monitoring
Performance dashboards
Alerting
Capacity monitoring
Log aggregation
Distributed tracing
Incident diagnostics
Prometheus
Grafana
ELK Stack
Splunk
Azure Monitor
Support production platforms within SLA.
Lead technical investigations.
Perform root cause analysis.
Recommend permanent fixes.
Participate in major incident resolution.
Drive platform stability improvements.
Platform Engineers
DevOps Engineers
Infrastructure Teams
Cloud Engineers
Security Teams
Application Developers
Architecture Teams
Operations Teams
6+ years' experience in Systems Engineering, Platform Engineering or Infrastructure Engineering.
4+ years' hands-on Kafka administration.
Enterprise production support experience.
Experience supporting highly available distributed systems.
Experience automating infrastructure and operational processes.
Experience working within DevOps environments.
Apache Kafka
Confluent Platform
Confluent Cloud
Broker administration
Topic management
Consumer groups
Partition management
Replication
Cluster upgrades
Performance tuning
Capacity planning
Python
Bash
Terraform
Ansible
CI/CD Pipelines
Azure DevOps
Git
Linux Administration
Shell scripting
Performance tuning
System troubleshooting
Microsoft Azure
Azure networking
Azure infrastructure
Azure Monitor
Hybrid cloud environments
TLS/SSL
SASL
ACLs
Certificates
Encryption
Authentication
Authorisation
Prometheus
Grafana
ELK Stack
Splunk
Azure Monitor
Log analysis
Alerting
Performance monitoring
Banking or Financial Services experience.
Confluent Cloud implementation experience.
Enterprise messaging platforms.
Event-driven architecture.
Kubernetes or container platforms.
Docker.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).
Platform Engineering.
Infrastructure as Code at enterprise scale.
Confluent Certified Developer or Administrator
Microsoft Azure Administrator
Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect
Azure DevOps Engineer
Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA)
Terraform Associate
Kubernetes Certifications (CKA/CKAD)
Desired Skills:
Kafka Operations
Kafka Platform Engineering
Event Streaming