Senior Kafka Platform Engineer – Hybrid Onsite (K8s/OpenShift)

Eliassen Group; Concord (CA); Hybrid; USD 124,000 - 166,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision benefits

401k with company matching

Life insurance

Job summary

Eliassen Group is seeking a Sr Software Engineer to lead and modernize enterprise Kafka streaming platforms from Concord, CA (hybrid) with onsite support in Charlotte, NC or Dallas, TX. You will design, implement, and optimize complex Kafka-based services, mentor teams, and drive production readiness across multiple environments.

Hybrid role requiring hands-on development and strong operational leadership, including incident response and observability improvements.

Qualifications

• 5+ years deploying on Kubernetes-based platforms (OpenShift preferred).
• 3+ years hands-on Apache Kafka, with Confluent exposure.
• 7+ years Linux/Unix servers support.
• 3+ years using CI/CD tools: Ansible, Git, Jenkins, Harness.
• 7+ years Software Engineering experience or equivalent.
• Kafka cluster operations, upgrades, capacity planning, troubleshooting.
• Familiarity with Kafka security (auth, authz, encryption).
• 2+ years supporting cloud migration initiatives.
• Observability experience with ELK, Splunk, AppDynamics, Grafana.
• Bonus: experience supporting Flink platforms.

Responsibilities

• Lead and support Kafka-related initiatives with enterprise impact and multiple teams.
• Define and evolve standards, best practices, and operational patterns for Kafka.
• Design, develop, test, and document software for Kafka tooling and integrations.
• Provide hands-on engineering for Kafka platforms, including incident response and RCA.
• Design, build, and maintain APIs for Kafka provisioning and config management.
• Automate deployments with CI/CD tooling for safe, auditable releases.
• Influence Kafka platform architecture and operational models.
• Collaborate with developers, SREs, and infrastructure to resolve issues.
• Advance observability with logging, metrics, dashboards, and alerts.
• Lead projects, mentor engineers, and contribute to knowledge sharing.

Tools

Kubernetes

OpenShift

Apache Kafka

Confluent Kafka

CI/CD

Ansible

Git

Jenkins

Harness

ELK

Splunk

AppDynamics

Grafana

Cloud migration

Flink (bonus)

Job description

Eliassen Group is seeking a Sr Software Engineer to lead and modernize enterprise Kafka streaming platforms from Concord, CA (hybrid) with onsite support in Charlotte, NC or Dallas, TX. You will design, implement, and optimize complex Kafka-based services, mentor teams, and drive production readiness across multiple environments.

Hybrid role requiring hands-on development and strong operational leadership, including incident response and observability improvements.