Kafka Platform Engineer

Kafka Platform Engineer
Irvine, CA (Hybrid)
Full-Time
JPC - 19722

Solugenix is assisting a client, a prestigious and large investment management company, in their search for a Kafka Platform Engineer. This is a full-time opportunity based out of Irvine, CA (Hybrid).

We are seeking a Senior Kafka Engineer to manage, enhance, and scale an enterprise-grade Apache Kafka implementation deployed on AWS and the Confluent Platform. This person will be responsible for keeping the system reliable, improving it over time, and expanding it to support new applications.

This role involves performing detailed architectural reviews, monitoring, performance tuning, optimizing existing Kafka pipelines, and partnering with application teams to deliver reliable, secure, and performant streaming solutions in a Fin Tech environment.

Qualifications:

• 8+ years in platform engineering with 3+ years of hands-on experience with Apache Kafka.
• Proficiency in Kafka client development using Java or Python.
• Expertise with Confluent Platform (Brokers, Schema Registry, Control Center, ksql
  
  DB).
• Experience deploying and managing Kafka on AWS (including MSK or self-managed EC2-based setups).
• Solid understanding of Kubernetes, especially EKS, for microservices integration.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, and schema management.
• Infrastructure automation experience with Terraform and Helm.
• Familiarity with monitoring and alerting stacks:
  Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, or similar.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Prior experience in the Fin Tech domain or other regulated industries.
• Understanding of security best practices, including TLS, authentication (SASL, OAuth), RBAC, and encryption at rest.
• Exposure to Apache Flink, Spark Streaming, or other stream processing engines.
• Experience establishing Kafka governance frameworks and multi-tenant topic strategies.
• Must Have & Desired
  
  Skills:
  
  Confluent Kafka, Terraform, Kubernetes, EKS.
• Nice to have Kafka Certification.