Senior Cloud Engineer - Kafka

• Deploy, operate, and maintain Kafka on Kubernetes using Strimzi across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• Own the Kafka cluster lifecycle: version upgrades, scaling, partition rebalancing, and capacity planning.
• Manage topics, users, and ACLs declaratively and keep configuration consistent across the fleet - detecting and preventing configuration drift.
• Build pre-release checks and automated quality gates for Kafka changes to catch issues before they reach production.
• Contribute to and debug existing Golang-based operators (Operator Framework).
• Design and template Helm charts for Kafka and related platform services.
• Automate deployments using CI/CD and GitOps principles (ArgoCD).
• Collaborate with platform and product teams to provide reliable, scalable event streaming for Dynatrace products.
• Participate in troubleshooting and incident resolution for Kafka and related infrastructure services.
• Use AI-assisted developer tooling and AIOps to automate toil, speed up troubleshooting, and continuously improve how we build and operate our services.
• Continuously improve monitoring and observability for Kafka (broker health, consumer lag, under-replicated partitions).

• Proven hands-on experience operating Kafka in production (upgrades, scaling, troubleshooting).
• Solid understanding of Kafka internals and distributed-systems fundamentals (partitioning, replication, leader election, consumer groups, delivery guarantees).
• Developer-oriented Kubernetes knowledge (less cluster ops, more application/service integration).
• Scripting/programming expertise in Bash and Go (or another higher-level language).
• Helm proficiency - creating and templating charts.
• Familiarity with CI/CD and GitOps workflows (ArgoCD).
• Experience using AI-assisted developer tooling (e.g. coding assistants, AI-driven troubleshooting) in your daily engineering work.
• Experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP (at least one).
• Basic understanding of Kubernetes Operators principles (CRD, Reconciliation) and willingness to contribute to Golang based Operators.

Nice-to-have:

• Experience with Strimzi or another Kafka operator, and with Cruise Control for rebalancing.
• Terraform/OpenTofu experience (infrastructure currently partly managed this way - migrating towards more operators).
• Monitoring & observability experience for Kafka (e.g. Prometheus metrics, consumer lag alerting).
• Experience with any of our broader infrastructure stack: PostgreSQL, Vault, RabbitMQ, Redis, Istio, External Secrets Operator (ESO) or Kyverno. The role offers plenty of opportunity to grow into these services alongside the Kafka focus.

Due to legal reasons, we are obliged to list a salary range for this position, which is €74,000 - € 92,000 gross per year based on full-time employment (38.5 h/week). We’ve listed the salary range for transparency, but if your experience and skills bring unique value, we’d still love to hear from you - please apply even if you’re outside the range.

• Dynatrace is a leader in unified observability and security.
• We provide a culture of excellence with competitive compensation packages designed to recognize and reward performance.
• Our employees work with the largest cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud, and other leading partners worldwide to create strategic alliances.
• You’ll get to work at the forefront of innovation with Dynatrace Intelligence-the industry’s first agentic operations system. Bringing together deterministic and agentic AI, it helps teams understand what’s happening, why it matters, and what to do next- automatically.
• Over 50% of the Fortune 100 companies are current customers of Dynatrace.