Job Title: Confluent Kafka L3 Engineer / Kafka Subject Matter Expert (SME)

Experience Required: 8–10 years overall IT experience, with at least 4–5 years of hands-on experience specifically on Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform in large-scale, mission-critical production environments.

Notice period: Immediate joiners - 15days only

Location / Work Mode: Mumbai, India (Onsite)

Work Timings: 10am - 7pm (6days a week)

Domain: Banking / Financial Services – Payments Applications

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced Confluent Kafka L3 Engineer to own the design, deployment, and production support of a mission-critical, geographically stretched Kafka cluster supporting core banking payment applications. The candidate will be responsible for ensuring high availability, resiliency, and performance of a Kafka ecosystem servicing ~4.5 crore (45 million) customer accounts with a sustained throughput of 5,000–10,000 TPS. This is a senior, hands-on role requiring deep platform expertise combined with strong understanding of banking payment workflows and the surrounding technology ecosystem.

Key Responsibilities

- Cluster Architecture & Solutioning: Design, architect, and optimize Confluent Kafka clusters stretched across four geographically distributed data centers. Define topic architecture, partitioning strategy, replication factor, and rack-awareness configurations. Provide solutioning inputs, capacity planning, and sizing for current and projected TPS loads. Collaborate with enterprise architects and application teams on event-driven and streaming solutions.

- Deployment & Configuration: Lead end-to-end deployment of Confluent Kafka components (Brokers, Zookeeper/Kraft, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, ksqlDB, REST Proxy, Control Center, and MirrorMaker/Cluster Linking). Manage cluster upgrades, patching, and version migrations with minimal downtime. Implement security configurations (SSL/TLS, SASL/Kerberos,



ACLs, RBAC). Configure and manage multi-DC replication strategies.

- Production Support & Troubleshooting (L3): Act as the highest level of technical escalation (L3) for production incidents, providing RCA and permanent fixes. Monitor and manage a environment supporting ~4.5 crore accounts with a throughput of 5,000–10,000 TPS. Troubleshoot broker failures, ISR issues, consumer lag, partition rebalancing, and replication issues. Perform deep-dive performance tuning (JVM, OS, network, producer/consumer). Drive proactive capacity planning.
- Monitoring & Operations: Set up and manage monitoring, alerting, and observability using Confluent Control Center, Prometheus, Grafana, and Splunk/ELK. Track operational metrics like broker health, under-replicated partitions, consumer lag, latency, and throughput. Ensure adherence to banking regulatory, audit, and compliance requirements. Participate in DR drills, BCP, and periodic failover testing.
- Ecosystem & Integration Knowledge: Demonstrate strong understanding of the surrounding banking ecosystem (core banking systems, payment gateways/switches, NPCI/RTGS/NEFT/IMPS/UPI rails, fraud engines, reconciliation systems). Partner with cross-functional teams to resolve issues impacting Kafka pipelines. Support integration via Kafka Connect, custom producers/consumers, and stream processing frameworks.
- Documentation & Governance: Create and maintain runbooks, SOPs, architecture diagrams, and knowledge base articles. Enforce platform best practices and governance.



Mentor L1/L2 support engineers.

Required Skills & Qualifications

- Technical Skills: 8–10 years total IT experience; minimum 4–5 years of dedicated Kafka/Confluent Platform experience. Hands-on expertise with Confluent Platform components. Proven experience managing stretched/multi-DC Kafka clusters and cross-DC replication. Strong understanding of Kafka internals, performance tuning, capacity planning, and troubleshooting. Working knowledge of Linux administration, networking fundamentals, and scripting (Shell/Python). Familiarity with security implementations (TLS/SSL, SASL, Kerberos, ACLs, RBAC) and monitoring tools. Exposure to stream processing frameworks is a plus.

- Domain Skills: Prior experience in banking/payments/fintech environments with an understanding of core banking, payment processing, and settlement/reconciliation workflows. Familiarity with regulatory and compliance requirements (RBI guidelines, data security standards, audit trails). Understanding of the broader banking technology ecosystem.

- Soft Skills: Strong analytical and problem-solving skills under pressure (P1/P2 situations). Excellent communication skills. Ability to lead RCA discussions and drive permanent fixes. Willingness to participate in on-call rotations.

Preferred / Positive to Have

- Confluent Certified Administrator / Developer for Apache Kafka certification.
- Experience with cloud-hosted Kafka (Confluent Cloud, MSK, or Azure Event Hubs for Kafka).
- Experience with containerization/orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) for Kafka deployments.
- Exposure to CI/CD pipelines for Kafka configuration and topic management (GitOps for Kafka).
- Prior experience in a bank, NBFC, or payments company handling similar scale.

Education

- - Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.

📌 Confluent KafkaEngineer/Kafka Subject Matter Expert (SME) (Mumbai)
🏢 Xpert Matters
📍 Mumbai