Technical Lead - Confluent Kafka (13+ years)

Experience gate: 13+ years total, with 6+ years hands-on on Kafka/Confluent Platform and at least 2-3 years leading a development team on Kafka/streaming work.

Responsibilities:

- Core Development: Design and develop Confluent Kafka-based applications, custom adaptors, custom connectors, KSQL scripts, and KStream applications.
- Performance Tuning: Execute performance optimization and fine-tuning of custom adaptors and connectors running on Confluent cluster nodes.
- Security Implementation: Implement security architecture models (such as RBAC, ACLs, Encryption, and mTLS/SSL) directly within the applications and connectors.
- Deployment Scripting: Write and prepare Confluent scripts for promoting changes related to Topics, Connectors, Streams, Adaptors, and KSQL into production environments.
- Troubleshooting & Bug Fixing: Perform hands-on monitoring, troubleshooting, and bug fixing to resolve system-related development defects.
- Production Readiness: Prepare and package production deployments, aligning with standard schedules and coordinating with testers for readiness validation.
- Testing & Go-Live: Provide direct, hands-on support during Unit Testing (UT), System Integration Testing (SIT), User Acceptance Testing (UAT), Staging, and Go-Live events.

Mandatory skills:

1. Event streaming requirement analysis and design. Has turned business requirements into stream pipeline designs, covering topic modelling, partitioning and keying strategy,



data contracts and event-driven architecture patterns.
2. Audit and retry mechanisms, end to end. Has designed and owned retry topics, DLQs, idempotent processing, replay and reprocessing, and audit trails in production. This is called out explicitly in the JD and is a solid filter.
3. Schema Registry governance. Has set and enforced compatibility modes (BACKWARD, FORWARD, FULL and their transitive variants) and schema evolution rules. Has managed subject naming strategies and built compatibility checks into CI pipelines.
4. Cluster upgrade experience. Has provided development-side guidance on Confluent Platform minor and major upgrades. That includes client and broker compatibility, rolling upgrades, rollback testing in staging, and ideally ZooKeeper-to-KRaft migration exposure.
5. Complex and systemic troubleshooting. Has been the escalation point for issues like rebalance storms, under-replicated partitions or ISR shrink, ordering and duplication problems, and cross-pipeline failures.
6. LLD documentation ownership. Has authored and maintained Low-Level Design documents in Confluence (Atlassian).
7. Technical leadership. Has led code reviews, enforced coding standards, mentored developers, and owned team deliverables through UT, SIT, UAT and Go-Live.

Disclaimer: This job posting has been aggregated from external source. Role details, content, and availability are subject to change. Applicants are advised to confirm the latest information directly on the company website before applying.

📌 Technical Lead Confluent Kafka (Bengaluru)
🏢 Cerebraix
📍 Bengaluru