Kafka Engineer

HRTX; Philippines; Hybrid; PHP 900,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Job summary

HRTX in Makati City is seeking a hands-on Kafka Platform Engineer to manage and scale production Kafka clusters across environments, delivering reliability and performance. The role emphasizes automation with Terraform/Ansible, on-boarding teams, security enforcement, and strong observability through Prometheus, Grafana, and EFK.

The ideal candidate will have 3+ years of production Kafka experience, Linux/Unix foundations, and solid CI/CD experience, with a bachelor’s degree in IT/CS.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of hands-on professional experience deploying and operating Apache Kafka clusters in enterprise production environments.
• Deep familiarity with Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, MirrorMaker 2, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong background in Linux/Unix administration, networking for distributed systems, and messaging patterns.
• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or equivalent technical experience.
• Strong problem-solving mindset, collaborative communication, and readiness to support critical applications in a 24/7 ecosystem.

Responsibilities

• Manage & scale production Apache Kafka clusters across environments.
• Automate provisioning and configuration for Kafka using Terraform or Ansible.
• Onboard and support application teams, troubleshoot platform issues, and maintain runbooks.
• Enforce security policies (TLS, SASL-SCRAM, ACLs) and contribute to data governance.
• Enhance observability with logging/alerting systems (Prometheus, Grafana, EFK).

Skills

Kafka deployment

Linux/Unix

Networking

Observability tools

CI/CD pipelines

Education

Bachelor's degree in IT/CS

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Job description

Work Setup: Hybrid 2-3x a week RTO | Mid Shift

Location: Makati City

What You'll Do

• Manage & Scale Kafka: Administer and optimize production Apache Kafka clusters across environments, driving performance tuning, topic management, and capacity planning.

• Automate Operations: Develop and maintain automation for Kafka provisioning and configuration using Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform or Ansible.

• Onboard & Support Teams: Partner with application teams to onboard new producers and consumers, troubleshoot platform issues, and maintain operational runbooks.

• Drive Governance & Security: Enforce security policies (TLS, SASL-SCRAM, ACLs), maintain data governance compliance, and contribute to the Event Catalog and Subscription API.

• Enhance Observability: Monitor platform health and metrics using logging and alerting systems (Prometheus, Grafana, EFK) to ensure high availability and minimal disruption.

What We're Looking For

• Experience: 3+ years of hands-on professional experience deploying and operating Apache Kafka clusters in enterprise production environments.

• Ecosystem Mastery: Deep familiarity with tools like Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, MirrorMaker 2, and CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, BitBucket, Rundeck).

• Technical Foundations: Strong background in Linux/Unix administration, networking for distributed systems, and messaging patterns.

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or equivalent technical experience.

• Core Competencies: Strong problem-solving mindset, collaborative communication skills, and readiness to support critical applications in a 24/7 ecosystem.

Bonus Points (Certifications)

• Confluent Certified Administrator for Apache Kafka (CCAAK) or similar vendor certifications.