Kafka Technical Lead/Senior Kafka Engineer

Blackfort PH; Philippines; On-site; PHP 1,200,000 - 2,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Blackfort PH is seeking a senior Kafka Platform Engineer to define enterprise Kafka standards and design resilient, multi-cluster environments. You will drive integration patterns using Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, and Schema Registry while ensuring security and governance across platforms.

You will mentor engineers, conduct architecture reviews, and collaborate with security, infrastructure, and application teams to deliver scalable, reliable data pipelines and event-driven architectures.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software and integration engineering experience.
• 4+ years of Apache Kafka platform engineering experience.
• Strong expertise in distributed systems, cloud platforms, Kubernetes, DevOps, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, Schema Registry, and enterprise security implementations.

Responsibilities

• Define enterprise Kafka architecture standards and best practices.
• Design multi-cluster, highly available, and disaster recovery capable Kafka environments.
• Establish topic design strategies, retention policies, partitioning models, and replication standards.
• Lead integration patterns leveraging Kafka, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and stream processing technologies.
• Provide technical guidance and mentoring to mid-level engineers.
• Conduct architecture reviews and design governance.
• Drive platform modernization and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Collaborate with enterprise architects, application teams, security teams, and infrastructure teams.
• Design and optimize Kafka cluster capacity and performance.
• Implement monitoring, observability, security, and governance controls.
• Troubleshoot production incidents and performance bottlenecks.
• Manage platform upgrades, migrations, and resilience testing.
• Establish authentication, authorization, encryption, and audit standards.
• Ensure compliance with enterprise security and data governance requirements.

Skills

Software engineering

Kafka platform engineering

Distributed systems

Cloud platforms

Kubernetes

DevOps

Event-driven architectures

Kafka ecosystem

Tools

Apache Kafka

Kafka Connect

Kafka Streams

Schema Registry

Job description

• 7+ years of software and integration engineering experience.
• 4+ years of Apache Kafka platform engineering experience.
• Strong expertise in distributed systems, cloud platforms, Kubernetes, DevOps, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, Schema Registry, and enterprise security implementations.

Key Responsibilities:

• Define enterprise Kafka architecture standards and best practices.
• Design multi-cluster, highly available, and disaster recovery capable Kafka environments.
• Establish topic design strategies, retention policies, partitioning models, and replication standards.
• Lead integration patterns leveraging Kafka, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and stream processing technologies.

Technical Leadership

• Provide technical guidance and mentoring to mid-level engineers.
• Conduct architecture reviews and design governance.
• Drive platform modernization and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Collaborate with enterprise architects, application teams, security teams, and infrastructure teams.
• Design and optimize Kafka cluster capacity and performance.
• Implement monitoring, observability, security, and governance controls.
• Troubleshoot critical production incidents and performance bottlenecks.
• Manage platform upgrades, migrations, and resilience testing.

Security & Compliance

• Establish authentication, authorization, encryption, and audit standards.
• Ensure compliance with enterprise security and data governance requirements.