Kafka Platform Engineer

About the role

Barclays is looking for a Kafka Platform Engineer to help develop and enhance its enterprise streaming platforms, which enable secure, reliable and real-time data movement across the bank. The role supports scalable, resilient and secure platform solutions that underpin key business services, working with modern cloud-native technologies, distributed systems and event-driven architectures at enterprise scale. It is based in Knutsford or Northampton and is listed as hybrid.

Key responsibilities

• Develop and deliver high-quality software solutions using industry-aligned languages, frameworks and tools, ensuring code is scalable, maintainable and performance-optimized.
• Collaborate with product managers, designers and other engineers to define requirements, devise solution strategies and integrate with business objectives.
• Take part in code reviews, stay up to date with technology trends and share knowledge with peers.
• Follow secure coding practices and implement effective unit testing.
• Lead and supervise a team, guide professional development, allocate work and coordinate resources; if the role has leadership duties, follow the LEAD leadership behaviours.
• Partner with other functions, take responsibility for end results, escalate policy breaches, embed new policies and manage risk and controls.

Required profile

• In-depth technical knowledge and thorough understanding of the assigned area of expertise.
• Ability to make evaluative judgements, solve problems and communicate complex information to team members and stakeholders.
• Demonstrates the Barclays values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship and the mindset to Empower, Challenge and Drive.

Required skills

• Designing, implementing and operating enterprise-scale Confluent Kafka platforms for business-critical workloads.
• Building secure, resilient, highly available streaming solutions, including multi-region and hybrid cloud environments.
• Applying distributed systems, event-driven architecture and platform automation, including Infrastructure as Code.
• Improving Kafka security, including RBAC, ACLs, OAuth, SSL/TLS and secrets protection.
• Working with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Cluster Linking and ksqlDB.
• Valued: Kafka Streams, Flink or Spark Streaming, and Kubernetes-based platforms.