Senior Kafka Administrator / Developer

Role Title: Senior Kafka Administrator / Developer Location: Sydney, NSW Role Summary The Senior Kafka Administrator / Developer will design, build, operate and improve enterprise Kafka and event-streaming platforms across AWS and Kubernetes, including Amazon EKS. The role requires strong hands-on Kafka administration, integration development, cloud-native operations and production support experience. The role works closely with application, integration, cloud, security and operations teams to deliver reliable event-driven solutions, resolve complex issues, automate repeatable tasks and support platform lifecycle, governance and service improvement activities. Key Responsibilities  Administer and support Kafka platforms, including brokers, topics, partitions, replication, consumer groups, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry and related services.  Design and develop Kafka producers, consumers, stream-processing components and reusable integration patterns using Java, Spring Boot, Python or similar technologies.  Deploy, operate and improve Kafka and supporting components on Kubernetes and Amazon EKS using Helm, CI/CD, GitOps and approved cloud-native patterns.  Manage platform reliability, resilience, capacity, performance, patching, upgrades, backup, recovery and lifecycle activities across production and non- production environments.  Troubleshoot complex issues across applications, brokers, connectors, schemas, networking, storage, certificates and cloud infrastructure.  Implement monitoring, alerting and dashboards for broker health, throughput, latency, replication, disk usage, consumer lag and connector health.  Apply security and governance controls, including TLS, authentication, authorisation, ACLs, secrets, certificates, least-privilege access and vulnerability remediation.  Support incidents, problems, changes and releases, including root-cause analysis, runbook improvement and automation of recurring operational tasks.  Guide application teams on topic design, partitioning, message contracts, schema evolution, retries, dead-letter handling, idempotency and supportability. Publi c  Maintain architecture, configuration, operational, recovery and support documentation. Technical Leadership  Act as the senior technical point of contact for Kafka platform design, engineering and operational matters.  Mentor engineers, review technical work and promote consistent engineering and operational standards.  Lead planning for upgrades, migrations, resilience improvements and platform modernisation.  Communicate risks, dependencies, options and recommendations clearly to technical and business stakeholders. Key Skills & Experience Technical Experience  Strong hands-on experience administering Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform in complex enterprise environments.  Solid understanding of Kafka brokers, topics, partitions, replication, consumer groups, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry and MirrorMaker.  Experience developing Kafka producers, consumers and integration services using Java, Spring Boot, Python or equivalent technologies.  Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Amazon EKS, including Docker, Helm, storage, networking, ingress, secrets and identity integration.  Working knowledge of AWS services such as EKS, EC2, S3, IAM, CloudWatch, Route 53 and core networking services.  Experience with CI/CD, GitOps and Infrastructure as Code tools such as Jenkins, Argo CD, Terraform or CloudFormation.  Strong Linux, networking, TLS, DNS, certificate and distributed-systems troubleshooting capability.  Experience with observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, Dynatrace, Splunk or equivalent. Preferred Qualifications Public  Degree in Information Technology, Engineering, Computer Science, or related discipline.  AWS, Azure, ITIL, Kubernetes, Database, or relevant technology certifications.  Experience managing large-scale enterprise or government technology environments.  Experience with hybrid cloud, platform modernization, and operational transformation programs.