Confluent Kafka - Lead Engineer

We are seeking an experienced Lead Engineer with strong expertise in Confluent Cloud/Confluent Kafka and Terraform to design, build, and operate scalable, secure, and highly available streaming data platforms. The ideal candidate will have hands-on experience with Kafka ecosystems, infrastructure automation, and DevOps best practices, and will play a key role in platform reliability, automation, and continuous improvement. Key Responsibilities: • Design, deploy, and manage Confluent Cloud environments for mission-critical streaming workloads • Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform for cloud and Confluent resources • Lead or contribute to the design of Kafka-based streaming platforms, including topics, schemas, connectors, and ACLs • Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins and Git • Automate infrastructure and configuration management using Chef and Ansible • Apply DevOps best practices to improve reliability, scalability, and performance • Monitor, log, and troubleshoot systems using Datadog and Splunk • Collaborate with application, data, and security teams to support event-driven and real-time data architectures. Required Skills & Qualifications: Must Have: • Strong hands-on experience with Confluent Cloud & Confluent Kafka • Strong hands-on experience with Terraform. Core Technical Skills: • DevOps practices and cloud-native engineering • CI/CD tools: Jenkins, Git • Configuration management: Chef, Ansible • Monitoring & logging: Datadog, Splunk