Kafka Platform Engineer

Job Title: Kafka Platform Engineer

Job Location: Austin, TX

Duration: 12+ Months

Job Description:

Experience with Confluent Kafka Platform
Experience with both On-Prem and Cloud
Must have experience leveraging AI powered tools and building AI driven agentsls as it relates to
Design and implement secure Kafka architectures, including authentication, authorization, encryption, and network isolation.
Define and support high availability, disaster recovery, and data replication strategies.
Ensure alignment with enterprise security, compliance, and governance standards.
Data Streaming & Integration
Advise on data ingestion, event streaming, batch and stream processing architectures.
Provide guidance on data modeling and serialization standards (Avro, Protobuf, JSON Schema).
Support enterprise integration use cases and resolve complex Kafka related integration challenges.
AI Development
Design and build AI agents, custom skills, or equivalent frameworks to automate engineering and operational workflows at scale
Leverage AI-powered tools (e.g., Copilot, AI agents) to accelerate development, automate testing, improve code quality, and enable intelligent SDLC workflows aligned to AI-DLC vision.
Design agentic workflows and multi-agent orchestration patterns to solve complex distributed systems, integration, and operational challenges
Strong hands-on experience with GitHub Copilot and other AI-assisted development tools, including advanced prompt engineering and workflow integration to accelerate engineering
Proven ability to leverage AI-assisted development (e.g., Copilot, code generation) and build AI-driven agents/workflows to improve team productivity and engineering efficiency
Automation & DevOps Enablement
Drive automation first operations using Python, Ansible, and scripting.
Build and maintain self-service operational tools to reduce day to day support overhead.
Integrate Kafka platform operations with DevOps and CI/CD tooling (e.g., Azure, Jenkins, Puppet, Chef).
Incident Management & Problem Resolution
Lead deep dive investigations into complex production issues and outages.
Perform root cause analysis, document findings, and drive remediation to closure.
Operate effectively in high pressure outage and incident management scenarios.
Advisory & Stakeholder Engagement
Act as a trusted technical advisor to client engineering, operations, and leadership teams.
Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Demonstrate strong customer focus, ownership, and onshore engagement.
Collaborate effectively with cross functional teams and vendors.
Required Experience & Skills
10+ years of experience in distributed systems, messaging, and enterprise platform engineering.
Extensive hands-on experience with Confluent Kafka Platform (on prem and cloud).
Strong background in Linux/Unix environments, networking, OS performance, and security.
Proven experience with automation, DevOps, and operational tooling.
Experience leveraging AI powered tools to accelerate development and improve team productivity and efficiency
Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
Strong organizational, relationship management, and teamwork skills.
Preferred Qualifications
Confluent Kafka and/or Cloud certifications.
Prior experience supporting large scale, regulated enterprise environments.

Mindlance is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate in employment on the basis of Minority/Gender/Disability/Religion/LGBTQI/Age/Veterans.