Data Platform SRE / Kafka Platform Engineer

• Support, monitor, and maintain microservices-based data platforms in production environments.
• Proactively monitor, troubleshoot, and resolve incidents across distributed systems and streaming platforms.
• Ensure high availability, reliability, and performance of Kafka-based ingestion and processing pipelines.
• Own operational readiness across non-production and production environments, including: Start/stop procedures, Dependency validation, Release support
• Drive automation initiatives across: Deployments, Vulnerability remediation, Monitoring and alerting, Operational recovery workflows

• Strong programming expertise in Java and/or Python.
• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka, including: Topics, partitions, brokers, Consumer groups, Kafka Connect, Lag monitoring and alert handling
• Proven experience in microservices architecture (build, support, and troubleshooting).
• Solid understanding of SRE principles, including: SLAs, SLOs, Incident response, Threshold-based alerting, Observability and system resilience
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and tools such as: Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, Nexus, Source control platforms (Git-based)
• Strong troubleshooting capability across logs, metrics, traces, infrastructure dependencies, and application failures.
• Kafka, Platform Operations & Environment Readiness
• Experience with data ingestion mechanisms including Kafka, SFTP, and APIs.
• Knowledge of data formats such as JSON and Parquet.
• Ability to manage and operate: Kafka topic inventory, Metadata/entity mapping, Topic classifications (K0/K1/K2), Consumer group operations
• Experience with: Kafka backlog monitoring Alert triage and incident response
• Exposure to Cloudera-managed Kafka environments (preferred).
• Ability to validate end-to-end operational readiness of non-production environments for releases.
• Platform, Infrastructure & Observability
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS or Azure).
• Hands-on knowledge of: Docker, Kubernetes (AKS preferred)
• Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools: Grafana, Prometheus, Pushgateway, Splunk
• Ability to validate: Dashboard ownership, Log routing, Reconciliation metrics, Monitoring coverage
• Understanding of platform dependencies across: Jenkins, Nexus, GOGS, Supporting infrastructure services
• Experience handling production incidents (P1/P2) and escalations.
• Strong exposure to: Root Cause Analysis (RCA) preparation, Support runbook execution
• Familiarity with ServiceNow (or similar ticketing systems) and queue management workflows.

Good understanding of:

• Application runbooks (start/stop order, escalation paths, thresholds)
• Access governance (AD/IDM, privileged access management)
• Change management processes and deployment ownership
• Exit procedures and access revocation controls

Key Skills: Kafka, SRE, Microservices, Platform Ops, (AWS/Azure), Kubernetes, CI/CD tools