Kafka Specialist at Datonomy Solutions

Datonomy Solutions

Emfuleni Local Municipality

On-site

ZAR 800,000 - 1,200,000

Full time

3 days ago

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Job summary

Datonomy Solutions seeks an experienced Technology Specialist – Kafka to design, administer, automate, secure, and optimise enterprise Kafka platforms supporting mission-critical banking applications. You will ensure stability, scalability, resilience and security while driving automation, DevOps practices and cloud adoption.

The role combines Kafka platform engineering with Linux administration, IaC, observability and cloud engineering to deliver highly available event streaming infrastructure

Qualifications

6+ years in Systems/Platform/Infrastructure Engineering.
4+ years hands-on Kafka administration.
Experience supporting highly available distributed systems.
Experience automating infrastructure and operational processes.
Experience in DevOps environments.
Banking or regulated industry experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

Install, configure, upgrade, patch and maintain Kafka clusters.
Administer Confluent Platform and/or Confluent Cloud environments.
Manage brokers, topics, partitions, replication and consumer groups.
Design highly available Kafka platforms across environments.
Develop and maintain automation to reduce manual effort.
Build and maintain monitoring and observability for Kafka platforms.

Skills

Kafka Administration

Linux Administration

DevOps Automation

IaC

Cloud Engineering

Observability

Security

Azure Cloud

CI/CD

Python

Terraform

Ansible

Git

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Python

Bash

Azure DevOps

Git

Job description

We are seeking an experienced Technology Specialist – Kafka to design, administer, automate, secure, and optimise enterprise Kafka platforms supporting mission-critical banking applications.

This role is responsible for ensuring the stability, scalability, resilience, and security of Kafka environments while driving automation, DevOps best practices, and cloud adoption.

The successful candidate will combine deep Kafka platform engineering expertise with Linux administration, Infrastructure-as-Code, observability, and cloud engineering to deliver highly available event streaming infrastructure that supports modern banking systems and real-time data integration.

Key Responsibilities

Kafka Platform Administration

Install, configure, upgrade, patch and maintain enterprise Kafka clusters.
Administer Confluent Platform and/or Confluent Cloud environments.
Manage brokers, topics, partitions, replication and consumer groups.
Optimise Kafka cluster performance, throughput and latency.
Perform capacity planning and scaling of Kafka infrastructure.
Troubleshoot broker failures, replication issues and performance bottlenecks.
Support production incidents and perform root cause analysis.

Platform Engineering

Design highly available Kafka platforms across multiple environments.
Implement resilient architectures for business-critical messaging workloads.
Configure multi-broker clusters with appropriate replication and fault tolerance.
Support disaster recovery and high availability strategies.
Maintain platform documentation and operational runbooks.

DevOps & Automation

Develop and maintain automation to reduce manual operational effort.

Responsibilities Include

Infrastructure as Code
Platform provisioning
Automated deployments
Configuration management
CI/CD integration
Environment standardisation

Typical Technologies Include

Terraform
Ansible
Python
Bash
Azure DevOps
Git

Linux Platform Administration

Provide specialist Linux administration supporting Kafka infrastructure.

Responsibilities Include

Performance tuning
Storage optimisation
Network troubleshooting
Service management
Operating system maintenance
Capacity management
Log analysis

Kafka Security

Design and maintain secure Kafka environments.

Responsibilities Include

TLS/SSL encryption
SASL authentication
ACL administration
Certificate lifecycle management
Identity integration
Secure client connectivity
Compliance with enterprise security standards

Cloud Engineering

Support Kafka deployments across cloud platforms, with a focus on Microsoft Azure.

Responsibilities Include

Azure networking
Virtual Machines
Managed services
Storage
Identity integration
Hybrid deployments
Cloud security
Platform optimisation

Experience with Confluent Cloud is highly advantageous.

Monitoring & Observability

Build comprehensive monitoring and operational visibility across Kafka platforms.

Responsibilities Include

Health monitoring
Performance dashboards
Alerting
Capacity monitoring
Log aggregation
Distributed tracing
Incident diagnostics

Typical Tools Include

Prometheus
Grafana
ELK Stack
Splunk
Azure Monitor

Incident & Problem Management

Support production platforms within SLA.
Lead technical investigations.
Perform root cause analysis.
Recommend permanent fixes.
Participate in major incident resolution.
Drive platform stability improvements.

Collaboration

Platform Engineers
DevOps Engineers
Infrastructure Teams
Cloud Engineers
Security Teams
Application Developers
Architecture Teams
Operations Teams

Experience

Minimum Requirements

6+ years' experience in Systems Engineering, Platform Engineering or Infrastructure Engineering.
4+ years' hands-on Kafka administration.
Enterprise production support experience.
Experience supporting highly available distributed systems.
Experience automating infrastructure and operational processes.
Experience working within DevOps environments.

Required Technical Skills

Kafka

Apache Kafka
Confluent Platform
Confluent Cloud
Broker administration
Topic management
Consumer groups
Partition management
Replication
Cluster upgrades
Performance tuning
Capacity planning

Automation

Python
Bash
Terraform
Ansible
CI/CD Pipelines
Azure DevOps
Git

Operating Systems

Linux Administration
Shell scripting
Performance tuning
System troubleshooting

Cloud

Microsoft Azure
Azure networking
Azure infrastructure
Azure Monitor
Hybrid cloud environments

Kafka Security

TLS/SSL
SASL
ACLs
Certificates
Encryption
Authentication
Authorisation

Monitoring & Observability

Prometheus
Grafana
ELK Stack
Splunk
Azure Monitor
Log analysis
Alerting
Performance monitoring

Preferred Experience

Banking or Financial Services experience.
Confluent Cloud implementation experience.
Enterprise messaging platforms.
Event-driven architecture.
Kubernetes or container platforms.
Docker.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).
Platform Engineering.
Infrastructure as Code at enterprise scale.

Nice-to-Have Certifications

Confluent Certified Developer or Administrator
Microsoft Azure Administrator
Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect
Azure DevOps Engineer
Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA)
Terraform Associate
Kubernetes Certifications (CKA/CKAD)

Ideal Candidate Profile

The ideal candidate is a senior Platform or Systems Engineer with deep expertise in Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform, capable of administering large-scale event streaming platforms in enterprise environments. They should have strong Linux administration skills, experience automating infrastructure through Terraform, Ansible, Python, and CI/CD pipelines, and a solid understanding of Kafka security, cloud infrastructure (particularly Azure), and modern observability practices. Experience within a regulated environment such as banking or financial services would be highly advantageous.

Desired Skills