Key Responsibilities
Platform Architecture & Design
Define and evolve the enterprise Kafka architecture, including cluster sizing, partitioning strategies, replication, and high availability.
Establish patterns for producers, consumers, and stream processing applications using Confluent components (Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, kSQLDB).
Design multi-region disaster recovery and failover strategies aligned with business continuity requirements.
Platform Governance & Standards
Implement naming conventions, topic lifecycle policies, and schema evolution standards.
Define RBAC and security guardrails leveraging Confluent Control Center, ACLs, and encryption (TLS, SASL).
Ensure compliance with internal governance and regulatory frameworks.
Performance & Observability
Set up monitoring and alerting for throughput, latency, consumer lag, and broker health using Confluent Control Center and integrated observability tools.
Optimize performance for large-scale streaming workloads; tune configurations for reliability and cost efficiency.
Integration & Enablement
Architect connectors for core banking systems, cloud data lakes, and analytics platforms.
Provide reusable patterns and onboarding guides for application teams; enable self-service provisioning where appropriate.
Collaborate with InfoSec, Cloud Engineering, and Data Governance teams to align platform capabilities with enterprise standards.
Innovation & Roadmap
Evaluate emerging Confluent features and event streaming trends; recommend adoption strategies.
Drive automation for provisioning, scaling, and patching using Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Ansible).
Qualifications
Must-Have
• 8+ years in enterprise data architecture or platform engineering roles.
• 4+ years hands-on experience with Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform in production environments.
• Strong knowledge of event-driven architecture, schema management (Avro/Protobuf), and stream processing.
• Expertise in security (TLS, SASL, RBAC), performance tuning, and observability for Kafka clusters.
• Familiarity with cloud-native deployments (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and Kubernetes-based Kafka operations.
• Preferred
• Experience with hybrid or multi-cloud Kafka deployments.
• Knowledge of financial services compliance and governance requirements.
• Exposure to automation frameworks and CI/CD pipelines for Kafka infrastructure.
