Kafka Platform Engineer

Job Description

Kafka Platform Engineer

Assignment Details

• Location: Onsite, Austin, TX — 4 days/week
• Duration: 12-month contract

Top 3 Must-Have Skills

1. Experience with the Confluent Kafka Platform
2. Experience with both on-prem and cloud environments
3. Experience leveraging AI-powered tools and building AI-driven agents

Key Responsibilities
Security & Compliance

• Design and implement secure Kafka architectures, including authentication, authorization, encryption, and network isolation
• Define and support high availability, disaster recovery, and data replication strategies
• Ensure alignment with enterprise security, compliance, and governance standards

Data Streaming & Integration

• Advise on data ingestion, event streaming, and batch/stream processing architectures
• Provide guidance on data modeling and serialization standards (Avro, Protobuf, JSON Schema)
• Support enterprise integration use cases and resolve complex Kafka-related integration challenges

AI Development

• Design and build AI agents, custom skills, or equivalent frameworks to automate engineering and operational workflows at scale
• Leverage AI-powered tools (e.g., Copilot, AI agents) to accelerate development, automate testing, improve code quality, and enable intelligent SDLC workflows
• Design agentic workflows and multi-agent orchestration patterns to solve complex distributed systems, integration, and operational challenges
• Strong hands-on experience with GitHub Copilot and other AI-assisted development tools, including advanced prompt engineering and workflow integration
• Proven ability to leverage AI-assisted development and build AI-driven agents/workflows to improve team productivity and engineering efficiency

Automation & DevOps Enablement

• Drive automation-first operations using Python, Ansible, and scripting
• Build and maintain self-service operational tools to reduce day-to-day support overhead
• Integrate Kafka platform operations with DevOps and CI/CD tooling (e.g., Azure, Jenkins, Puppet, Chef)

Incident Management & Problem Resolution

• Lead deep-dive investigations into complex production issues and outages
• Perform root cause analysis, document findings, and drive remediation to closure
• Operate effectively in high-pressure outage and incident management scenarios

Advisory & Stakeholder Engagement

• Act as a trusted technical advisor to Schwab engineering, operations, and leadership teams
• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Demonstrate strong customer focus, ownership, and onshore engagement
• Collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams and vendors

Required Experience & Skills

• 10+ years of experience in distributed systems, messaging, and enterprise platform engineering
• Extensive hands-on experience with the Confluent Kafka Platform (on-prem and cloud)
• Strong background in Linux/Unix environments, networking, OS performance, and security
• Proven experience with automation, DevOps, and operational tooling
• Experience leveraging AI-powered tools to accelerate development and improve team productivity and efficiency
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Strong organizational, relationship management, and teamwork skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Confluent Kafka and/or cloud certifications
• Prior experience supporting large-scale, regulated enterprise environments