AISL-273 Junior DevOps Engineer – Kafka Service

Position Overview

We are looking for a Junior DevOps Engineer to take ownership of the Kafka service within our IT ecosystem.

The ideal candidate will be responsible for deploying, configuring, monitoring, and maintaining the Kafka infrastructure to ensure high availability, scalability, and strong performance.

This role requires initial expertise in Apache Kafka, strong automation skills, and experience managing distributed data streaming platforms in a complex enterprise environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Kafka Administration & Operations: Deploy, configure, monitor, and maintain Kafka clusters in a high-availability production environment.
• Performance Optimization: Tune Kafka configurations (partitions, replication, producers/consumers) to ensure efficient message streaming.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Automate Kafka infrastructure deployment and management using Terraform, Ansible, or similar tools.
• Monitoring & Incident Management: Implement monitoring solutions (e.g., Dynatrace) and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks, latency issues, and failures.
• Security & Compliance: Ensure secure data transmission and access control by applying best practices (SSL/TLS, RBAC, Kerberos).
• CI/CD & Automation: Integrate Kafka into CI/CD pipelines and automate deployment processes to improve efficiency and reliability.
• Capacity Planning & Scalability: Analyze workloads, plan horizontal scaling, optimize resources, and define failover strategies.
• Collaboration: Work closely with development teams to support Kafka-based applications and ensure smooth data flow.
• Provide training and technical support to end users and stakeholders.
• Write and update procedures.
• Contribute to the knowledge base.
• Work collaboratively as part of a team.

Required Skills & Experience

• Minimum 2 years of experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or Kafka administration.
• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka (installation, configuration, tuning, troubleshooting).
• Proficiency in scripting (Python, Bash) and automation tools (Terraform, Ansible).
• Experience with cloud environments (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and Kubernetes-based Kafka deployments.
• Familiarity with Kafka Connect, KSQL, Schema Registry, and Zookeeper.
• Knowledge of logging and monitoring tools (Dynatrace, ELK, Splunk).
• Understanding of networking, security, and access control for Kafka clusters.
• Experience with CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab, ArgoCD).
• Ability to analyze logs, debug issues, and propose proactive improvements.
• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills.
• ITIL certification is an asset.
• Strong oral and written communication skills to interact professionally with internal and external stakeholders.
• Ability to work in an international and multicultural environment.
• Ability to work independently and within a team.
• Knowledge of AWS and Kubernetes.

Nice-to-Have

• Experience with Confluent Kafka or other managed Kafka solutions.
• Knowledge of event-driven architectures and stream processing (Flink, Spark, Kafka Streams).
• Experience with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd) for Kafka networking.
• Certifications in Kafka, Kubernetes, or cloud platforms.

Requirements

• EU citizenship required.
• Ability to work in shifts (7:00 AM – 8:00 PM) and provide 24/7 support, including outside regular shift hours.
• Fluency in English (written and spoken) is mandatory.
• Proficiency in another European language is a plus.