Job Description:
Senior Systems Engineer – Kafka Platform Specialist
Location: Johannesburg- Hybrid 3 days in the office
Employment Type: 12 Months independent contract
We are looking for a Senior Systems Engineer – Kafka Platform Specialist to take ownership of the reliability, security, performance, and automation of a production event-streaming environment.
What You'll Do:
- Operate and support production Kafka platforms, including monitoring, incident response, troubleshooting and performance tuning
- Plan and execute Kafka upgrades, patching and lifecycle activities
- Design scalable, resilient and secure Kafka architectures
- Automate infrastructure and operational processes using DevOps and IaC
- Partner with application teams to onboard workloads and improve platform standards
What We're Looking For:
- 6+ years of Systems / Platform Engineering experience
- 4+ years hands-on Kafka administration
- Experience with Confluent Platform and/or Confluent Cloud
- Strong Python/Bash scripting and automation skills
- Experience with CI/CD, Terraform and/or Ansible
- Strong Linux administration and troubleshooting skills
- Azure Cloud experience preferred
- Strong understanding of Kafka security: TLS/SSL, SASL and ACLs
- Experience with observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Splunk or Azure Monitor
If you're a Kafka specialist with strong platform engineering and DevOps experience, we'd love to hear from you.