Senior Kafka Administrator / Developer (Kafka, AWS EKS)

Avance Consulting; Sydney; On-site; AUD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Avance Consulting is seeking a Senior Kafka Administrator/Developer in Sydney to design, build and operate enterprise Kafka and event-streaming platforms on AWS and Kubernetes. You will lead production support, automate repeatable tasks and drive platform governance.

The role requires hands-on Kafka administration, integration development and cloud-native operations, collaborating with security, operations and application teams to deliver reliable, scalable event-driven solutions.

Qualifications

• The role requires hands-on Kafka administration and production support.
• Strong familiarity with AWS, Kubernetes and EKS is expected.
• Experience designing and delivering event-driven architectures with Java/Spring Boot/Python.
• Proven ability to lead platform governance, upgrades and incident response.

Responsibilities

• Administer and support Kafka brokers, topics and partitions, including MirrorMaker.
• Design and develop Kafka producers, consumers and integration services using Java/Spring Boot/Python.
• Deploy, operate and improve Kafka on Kubernetes and Amazon EKS using Helm and CI/CD pipelines.
• Manage platform reliability, capacity, patching, backup and lifecycle activities.
• Implement monitoring, security controls (TLS, authentication, ACLs) and observability.
• Guide application teams on topic design, partitioning, schema evolution and retries.

Skills

Kafka administration

Confluent Platform

Kafka Connect

Schema Registry

Java

Spring Boot

Python

Kubernetes

Amazon EKS

Docker

CI/CD

GitOps

Terraform

CloudFormation

Prometheus

Grafana

CloudWatch

Linux troubleshooting

Education

Bachelor's degree in IT or related field

Tools

Jenkins

Argo CD

Docker

Helm

Git

Prometheus

Grafana

Job description

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‑
• 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 & 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
• 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
• AWS, Azure, ITIL, Kubernetes, Database, or relevant technology certifications.
• Experience managing large‑scale enterprise or government technology
• Experience with hybrid cloud, platform modernization, and operational