Kafka Platform Engineer

Wave Group; Glasgow; Hybrid; GBP 54,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Wave Group in Glasgow is hiring a Streaming Platform Engineer to help build the bank's next-generation enterprise Kafka service. You will be a hands-on senior engineer in a small, high-impact team, designing and operating a secure, resilient, multi-region streaming platform used across the bank for real-time data.

You will own major parts of the platform end to end, from architecture to production, raise the engineering bar through code reviews, mentoring, and help move tenants from the existing

Qualifications

• Experience with Apache Kafka in production including broker internals, replication, partitioning, KRaft or ZooKeeper, and performance tuning.
• Hands-on platform engineering on Kubernetes (OpenShift preferred), IaC, Helm, and GitOps with CI/CD in GitLab or similar.
• Building multi-tenant platform capabilities with isolation, quotas, access control and capacity management.
• Security for streaming platforms—mTLS, certificate lifecycle, secrets management and audit.

Responsibilities

• Own major parts of the platform end to end, from architecture to production.
• Raise the engineering bar through code, reviews and mentoring.
• Move tenants from legacy estate to a platform built for self-service and automation.

Skills

Apache Kafka

Kubernetes/OpenShift

CI/CD

GitOps

Confluent Platform

Schema Registry

Java

Python

Security for streaming

Observability

SRE

Multi-region platforms

Tenant isolation

Tools

OpenShift

GitLab

Helm

Confluent Platform

Schema Registry

Job description

Salary: up to £90k + 15% bonus + 10% pension

Location: Glasgow (3 office days/week)

VISA sponsorship is NOT available

Join this Tier 1 UK bank as a Streaming Platform Engineer and help build the bank's next-generation enterprise Kafka service. As a hands‑on senior engineer in a small, high‑impact team, you will design and build a secure, resilient, multi‑region streaming platform that applications across the bank will rely on for real‑time data. You will own major parts of the platform end to end, from architecture to production, raise the engineering bar through code, reviews and mentoring, and help move tenants from the existing estate onto a platform built for self‑service and automation.

To be successful, you should have experience with:

• Apache Kafka as a senior engineer in production (or a closely adjacent distributed log or messaging platform): broker internals, replication and partitioning, KRaft or ZooKeeper, client behaviour, performance tuning and incident resolution – having built or run Kafka as a shared platform, not only written applications against it
• Software engineering - deploying high quality code into production (any language is fine)
• Hands‑on platform engineering on Kubernetes (ideally OpenShift), infrastructure as code, Helm and GitOps, with CI/CD in GitLab or similar – shipping secure, production‑grade platform changes through automated, tested pipelines
• Building multi‑tenant platform capabilities – tenant onboarding, isolation, quotas, access control and capacity management – that let other teams use the platform safely
• Engineering for high availability and resilience – multi-data‑centre or multi-region clusters, failure testing and recovery

Some other valued skills may include:

• Confluent Platform (or equivalent), including Confluent for Kubernetes, Schema Registry, Cluster Linking and role‑based access control
• Migrating applications from a legacy platform to a new one with minimal disruption
• Policy‑as‑code and self‑service guardrails, and strong programming skills in Python or Java for platform tooling
• Security for streaming platforms – mTLS and certificate lifecycle, secrets management, encryption and audit
• Observability and SRE practice – metrics, SLOs, alerting, runbooks and on‑call for a critical service
• Event-driven architecture and event standards (for example CloudEvents and schema governance)
• Proven technical delivery in a regulated industry, including change management and controls
• Strong collaboration and communication skills across technical and non-technical teams