Senior Kafka Platform Engineer – Hybrid/Onsite

Eliassen Group; Concord (CA); Hybrid; Confidential; Full time

Job summary

Eliassen Group is seeking a Sr Software Engineer to support, enhance, and modernize enterprise Kafka streaming platforms. The role combines hands-on engineering with operational leadership to ensure available, scalable event streaming services and guide adoption patterns across teams.

Ideal candidates have extensive Kubernetes/OpenShift experience, strong Kafka knowledge, and a track record of delivering secure, observable platforms.

Qualifications

• 5+ years deploying and supporting software on Kubernetes-based platforms, preferably OpenShift.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience supporting Apache Kafka, with preference for Kubernetes-based operations and Confluent Kafka exposure.
• 7+ years of support experience on Linux or Unix servers.
• 3+ years using CI/CD tools such as Ansible, Git, Jenkins, or Harness.
• 7+ years of Software Engineering experience or equivalent through work, training, military experience, or education.
• Kafka cluster operations, upgrades, capacity planning, and performance troubleshooting.
• Familiarity with Kafka security including authentication, authorization, and encryption.
• 3+ years with observability tools such as ELK, Splunk, AppDynamics, or Grafana.
• 2+ years supporting or contributing to cloud migration initiatives.
• Experience leveraging automation to improve Kafka support efficiency and reduce operational risk.
• Bonus: Experience supporting Flink platforms.

Responsibilities

• Lead and support complex Kafka-related initiatives with enterprise impact and multi-team dependencies.
• Define and evolve standards, best practices, and operational patterns for Kafka-based streaming solutions.
• Design, develop, test, debug, and document software and platform components that support Kafka infrastructure, tooling, and integrations.
• Provide hands-on engineering and support for Kafka platforms, including incident response, root cause analysis, and remediation.
• Design, build, and maintain APIs and services for Kafka provisioning, monitoring, configuration management, and client integration.
• Implement CI/CD automation for Kafka platform services and tooling for safe and auditable deployments.
• Influence Kafka platform architecture, operational models, and support processes using industry best practices.
• Collaborate with application developers, SREs, infrastructure teams, and senior stakeholders to resolve complex Kafka issues.
• Advance observability through logging, metrics, dashboards, and alerting strategies.
• Lead projects, mentor engineers, and contribute to knowledge sharing and operational maturity.

Skills

Kubernetes

OpenShift

Apache Kafka

CI/CD

Linux

Observability

Software Engineering

Mentoring

Tools

Ansible

Git

Jenkins

Harness

ELK Stack

Splunk

AppDynamics

Grafana

Job description

Eliassen Group is seeking a Sr Software Engineer to support, enhance, and modernize enterprise Kafka streaming platforms. The role combines hands-on engineering with operational leadership to ensure available, scalable event streaming services and guide adoption patterns across teams.

Ideal candidates have extensive Kubernetes/OpenShift experience, strong Kafka knowledge, and a track record of delivering secure, observable platforms.