Senior Platform Engineer (Kafka/ Confluent Cloud)

Contract details: Location: LondonHybrid: 1/2 days per week onsiteRate: Up to £700/day (Inside IR35)Initial 6 Month (rolling contract) We are seeking an experienced Kafka Specialist to support a large renowned organisation based in London. This role would suit a strong Platform Engineer or Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with strong Confluent Cloud Kafka expertise and a background in cloud native infrastructure and automation. Key requirements: Strong background in Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or DevOps, with 3-5+ years of hands-on experience administering Apache Kafka or Confluent Kafka in production environments.Proven experience provisioning, managing, and optimising Kafka and Confluent Cloud platforms, including Kafka clusters, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, monitoring, integrations, and day-to-day platform operations.Strong Kubernetes experience and a solid understanding of cloud-native platforms, preferably within Azure environments.Strong expertise in Kafka administration, including cluster management, performance tuning.Hands-on experience with Confluent Platform or Confluent Cloud.Proficient with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure automation.