Senior Kafka Platform Engineer – Onsite Austin, AI-Driven

Apex Systems; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

ESPP

401K

HSA

EAP

Job summary

Everforth Apex Systems in Austin, TX seeks a Senior Platform Engineer (Kafka) to design secure Kafka architectures, lead enterprise platform engineering, and drive automation across cloud and on-premises environments.

The role emphasizes 10+ years of distributed systems experience, Confluent Kafka expertise, and AI-enabled development to modernize engineering workflows. On-site four days weekly, with collaboration across engineering and operations teams.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in distributed systems, messaging, and enterprise platform engineering.
• Extensive hands-on experience with the Confluent Kafka Platform, both on-premise and in the cloud.
• Proven ability to leverage AI-assisted development and build AI-driven agents/workflows.
• Strong background in Linux/Unix environments, networking, OS performance, and security.
• Proven experience with automation, DevOps, and operational tooling (Azure, Jenkins, Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Python).
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with strong organizational and teamwork abilities.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement secure Kafka architectures, including authentication, authorization, encryption, and network isolation.
• Define and support high availability, disaster recovery, and data replication strategies, ensuring alignment with enterprise standards.
• Advise on data ingestion, event streaming, and batch and stream processing architectures.
• Provide guidance on data modeling and serialization standards such as Avro, Protobuf, and JSON Schema.
• Design and build AI agents and custom frameworks to automate engineering and operational workflows at scale.
• Leverage AI-powered tools like Copilot to accelerate development, automate testing, and improve code quality.
• Drive automation-first operations using Python, Ansible, and scripting, and build self-service operational tools.
• Lead deep-dive investigations into complex production issues, perform root cause analysis, and drive remediation.
• Act as a trusted technical advisor to engineering, operations, and leadership teams.

Skills

Confluent Kafka

AI-assisted development

Linux/Unix

Networking

Security

Automation/DevOps tools

Python

Tools

Azure

Jenkins

Puppet

Chef

Ansible

Job description

Everforth Apex Systems in Austin, TX seeks a Senior Platform Engineer (Kafka) to design secure Kafka architectures, lead enterprise platform engineering, and drive automation across cloud and on-premises environments.

The role emphasizes 10+ years of distributed systems experience, Confluent Kafka expertise, and AI-enabled development to modernize engineering workflows. On-site four days weekly, with collaboration across engineering and operations teams.