Lead Kafka Software Engineer /Platform Engineer .

Location: – Dallas, TX ,Charlotte, NC, Concord, CA/ SFO. CA in person client interview is mandate

- 100% onsite 3 days from office and candidate must go for in person client interview which is mandate

Lead Kafka Software Engineer

About This Role

Client is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to support, enhance, and modernize its enterprise Kafka streaming platforms.

This role combines deep technical expertise with hands‑on engineering and operational leadership to ensure highly available, scalable, and observable event streaming services.

The ideal candidate will demonstrate strong ownership of Kafka-based systems, lead complex technical initiatives, and drive reliability and support excellence across teams.

The Lead Software Engineer will play a critical role in maintaining platform stability, guiding Kafka adoption patterns, and supporting application teams through design, onboarding, and production readiness.

This role requires a strong sense of urgency, a passion for operational rigor, and the ability to influence best practices across the organization.

In This Role, You Will

Lead and support complex Kafka-related technology initiatives, including those with enterprise-wide impact and multi-team dependencies.

Act as a key contributor in defining and evolving companywide standards, best practices, and operational patterns for Kafka-based streaming solutions.

Design, develop, test, debug, and document software and platform components that support Kafka infrastructure, tooling, and integrations.

Provide hands‑on engineering and support for Kafka platforms, including incident response, root cause analysis, and long-term remediation.

Design, build, and maintain APIs and services that enable Kafka provisioning, monitoring, configuration management, and client integration.

Implement CI/CD automation for Kafka platform services and tooling, ensuring safe, consistent, and auditable deployments across environments

Make technical decisions that influence Kafka platform architecture, operational models, and support processes, incorporating industry best practices and emerging technologies.

Collaborate closely with application developers, site reliability engineers, infrastructure teams, and senior technology stakeholders to resolve complex Kafka-related issues.

Support Kafka platform observability by contributing to logging, metrics, dashboards, and alerting strategies.

Lead project initiatives, mentor peer engineers, and contribute to knowledge sharing and operational maturity across the Kafka support team.

Required Qualifications

7+ years of Software Engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated through one or a combination of work experience, training, military experience, or education.

7+ years of support experience on Linux/Unix servers.

5+ years of experience deploying and supporting software on Kubernetes-based platforms.

3+ years of hands‑on experience supporting Apache Kafka.

3+ years of experience using CI/CD tools including Ansible, Git, Jenkins, Harness.

Desired Qualifications

Experience with Kafka cluster operations, upgrades, capacity planning, and performance troubleshooting.

Familiarity with Kafka security features, including authentication, authorization, and encryption.

3+ years of experience with observability tools such as ELK, Splunk, AppDynamics, or Grafana.

2+ years of experience supporting or contributing to cloud migration initiatives.

Experience leveraging automation to improve Kafka support efficiency and reduce operational risk.

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