DevOps Engineer – Kafka Streaming Platform

About the role

We are looking for two experienced Kafka DevOps Engineers to join our Streaming Centre of Excellence in Manchester. You will be responsible for delivering, enhancing and supporting enterprise‑scale streaming services that power real‑time data ingestion and event‑driven architectures.

Key responsibilities

• Design, deploy, manage and optimise enterprise Kafka platforms across multiple environments.
• Configure and maintain Kafka clusters, topics, partitions, replication, consumer groups and security controls (SSL/TLS, ACLs, authentication).
• Perform platform upgrades, scaling, failover testing and capacity planning.
• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps) and automate platform changes.
• Manage Kubernetes‑based deployments using Helm, ArgoCD and GitOps practices.
• Implement monitoring, alerting and observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Dynatrace, Confluent Control Center).
• Collaborate with engineering, infrastructure and application teams to ensure reliability and operational excellence.

Required profile

• Proven experience with Apache Kafka, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Kafka Streams and ZooKeeper/KRaft.
• Strong background in DevOps automation, CI/CD pipeline creation and infrastructure as code.
• Hands‑on experience with Kubernetes, Helm, ArgoCD and GitOps workflows.
• Practical knowledge of at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure or GCP).
• Experience implementing monitoring, alerting and SRE principles.

Required skills

• Kafka, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Kafka Streams, ZooKeeper, KRaft
• SSL/TLS, ACLs, authentication, encryption
• Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps
• Terraform, Ansible
• Kubernetes, Helm, ArgoCD, GitOps
• ConfigMaps, Secrets, certificate management
• AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform
• Prometheus, Grafana, Dynatrace, Confluent Control Center