Technical Product Owner – Data Streaming Platform - KAFKA - Remote

Technical Product Owner – Data Streaming Platform - KAFKA EXPERT

 | $65/hr | Remote | 

Kafka exp is mandatory and should be very extensive

About the Role

We are looking for a highly technical product owner to own the design, deployment, and operations of our enterprise data streaming platform, with a primary focus on Confluent Kafka infrastructure on Azure and Google Cloud Platform. This is not a traditional product owner role, and it demands deep hands-on expertise in Kafka platform administration, cloud-native Kafka deployments, stream processing infrastructure, and CDC patterns. You will be expected to translate business and data streaming requirements into precise engineering specifications, drive platform buildout, and serve as the technical authority for all things Kafka across the enterprise. If you have administered Kafka clusters, designed connector topologies, and deployed Confluent on Kubernetes, and can also run a SAFe PI planning, then this role was built for you.

Role & Responsibilities

• Own the product backlog: decompose epics and business vision into well-defined, developer-ready features and engineering specifications for the streaming platform.
• Expected to deeply understand the "what”, the business intent and streaming use case, and independently derive a very detailed and technical "how”, the infrastructure design, deployment architecture, and engineering specifications ready for the development team.
• Lead the design and buildout of Confluent Kafka infrastructure on Azure and Google Cloud Platform, ensuring enterprise-grade scalability, resilience, and security.
• Define and govern real-time streaming and event-driven architecture patterns adopted across all application and data teams.
• Drive and own ceremonies of SAFe Agile / LPM, including PI planning, iteration planning, backlog refinement, and other ceremonies.
• Must be hands-on technical with the ability to independently write proof-of-concepts (POCs) and reference implementations to guide and accelerate the development team.
• Own Kafka platform administration standards including cluster configuration, topic design, consumer group strategies, schema governance, and data retention policies.
• Build and govern CDC pipelines using Debezium and Kafka Connect, including source and sink connector development and operations.
• Experience building and operationalizing Kafka clusters on Kubernetes using Confluent for Kubernetes, including deployment, scaling, configuration, and day-2 operations
• Experience deploying and configuring Confluent Platform using Ansible playbooks, including cluster provisioning, configuration management, and automated upgrades.
• Define and enforce cloud networking standards for Kafka infrastructure including private networking, and security controls.
• Align cross-functional stakeholders on streaming platform roadmap, architectural tradeoffs, and delivery priorities
• Own capacity management of the streaming platform, including resource planning, scaling strategies, and performance optimization
• Experience with traffic throttling and workload governance using Kafka quotas across producers and consumers
• Experience designing and implementing Kafka disaster recovery patterns, including multi-region replication and failover strategies
• Experience with Confluent Platform Cluster Linking for cross-cluster and cross-region data replication
• Experience building diverse source and sink connector data pipelines using Kafka Connect across a variety of enterprise systems and data stores
• Experience building and managing multi-tenant Flink infrastructure, enabling isolated and secure stream processing workloads across multiple teams and use cases
• Define stream processing infrastructure patterns using Confluent Flink and guide teams in building real-time processing pipelines

Technical Skills Required