Senior Kafka Platform Engineer (12-Month Contract) at DeARX Services (Pty) Ltd

• Are you an experienced Kafka Platform Engineer with a passion for building resilient, secure, and highly available event streaming platforms? We're looking for a talented professional to join a leading financial institution in Sandton, where you'll play a key role in evolving and maintaining enterprise technology assets that support critical business services.
• This is an exciting opportunity to take ownership of a modern Kafka platform, influence engineering best practices, and work alongside high-performing technology teams delivering enterprise-scale solutions.

As a Senior Kafka Platform Engineer, you will:

• Own and drive the evolution, stability, and continuous improvement of enterprise technology assets.
• Lead the engineering and operational management of Kafka platforms across development, testing, and production environments.
• Ensure platform reliability, scalability, performance, and availability through proactive monitoring and optimisation.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning, deployments, and operational processes using Infrastructure as Code and DevOps practices.
• Implement and maintain Kafka security standards, including authentication, encryption, and access controls.
• Build and enhance platform observability using modern monitoring, logging, and alerting solutions.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues and provide expert-level support for critical platform services.
• Collaborate with developers, architects, infrastructure teams, and business stakeholders to deliver robust event-driven solutions.
• Drive engineering standards, governance, and best practices within the Centre of Excellence (CoE).
• Mentor team members and contribute to continuous platform innovation.

Required Experience

• 6+ years' experience in Systems or Platform Engineering.
• 4+ years' hands-on Kafka administration experience, preferably with Confluent Platform and/or Confluent Cloud.
• Strong experience supporting enterprise-scale distributed platforms.
• Proven experience working within DevOps and Agile environments.

Technical Skills

• Apache Kafka administration and platform management.
• Confluent Platform and/or Confluent Cloud.
• Linux administration and advanced troubleshooting.
• DevOps automation using Python and/or Bash.
• CI/CD pipeline implementation.
• Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and/or Ansible.
• Cloud experience, preferably Microsoft Azure.
• Kafka security including TLS/SSL, SASL, ACLs, and authentication mechanisms.
• Monitoring and observability using tools such as:
• Prometheus
• Grafana
• ELK Stack
• Splunk
• Azure Monitor