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Selby Jennings · 1 week ago

Senior Kafka Platform Engineer

Chicago, IL

Full-time

Hybrid

Senior Level

$200K/yr - $500K/yr

Selby Jennings is a top Asset Management firm looking for a seasoned Kafka Engineer to design, operate, and scale their event streaming platform. The role focuses on architecture, automation, and reliability engineering, requiring expertise in Kafka and Kubernetes.

BankingEmploymentRecruiting

Hiring Manager

Caitlin Wagner

Responsibilities

Architect, deploy, and operate production-grade Kafka clusters (self-managed and/or Confluent/MSK), including upgrades, capacity planning, multi-AZ/region DR, and performance tuning

Operate Kafka on Kubernetes using Operators, Helm, and GitOps; build IaC-driven automation with guardrails for zero-downtime provisioning

Implement and manage Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and MirrorMaker 2/Cluster Linking; standardize connectors (e.g., Debezium) and enable self-service patterns

Drive reliability: define SLOs/error budgets, on-call rotations, incident response, postmortems, runbooks, and automated remediation

Implement observability: metrics, logs, traces, lag monitoring, and capacity dashboards (Prometheus/Grafana, Burrow, Cruise Control, OpenTelemetry)

Secure the platform: TLS/mTLS, SASL (OAuth/SCRAM), RBAC/ACLs, secrets management, network policies, audit, and compliance automation

Guide event-streaming best practices: topic design, partitioning, retention, idempotency, ordering, schema evolution, DLQs, EOS semantics

Collaborate with app, data, and SRE teams; provide enablement, documentation, and internal tooling for a great developer experience

Lead and mentor engineers; contribute to roadmap, standards, and platform strategy

Qualification

KafkaKubernetesInfrastructure as CodeSecurity practicesPythonCloud experienceObservabilityAutomation mindsetReliability engineeringSoft skills

Required

Deep hands-on experience operating Kafka at scale in Big Tech, trading, or asset management environments

Strong Kubernetes expertise running stateful systems

Automation-first mindset: Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), Helm, Operators, GitOps (Argo CD/Flux), and CI/CD (GitHub Actions/Jenkins)

Proficiency in Python, Go, or Java, plus Bash and solid Linux fundamentals (networking, filesystems, JVM tuning basics)

Observability and reliability engineering for Kafka: Prometheus/Grafana, logging, alerting, lag monitoring, capacity/throughput modeling, performance tuning

Security for data in motion: TLS/mTLS, SASL/OAuth, ACL/RBAC, secrets management (Vault), and audit/compliance practices

Experience with Kafka ecosystem components: Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker 2/Cluster Linking; familiarity with Cruise Control

Cloud experience (AWS/Azure/GCP) with networking, IAM, and managed offerings (Confluent Cloud or AWS MSK)

Proven track record designing runbooks, leading incidents/postmortems, and driving platform roadmaps

Preferred

Data processing frameworks (Kafka Streams, Flink, Spark Structured Streaming) and EOS semantics

Experience with Strimzi or Confluent for Kubernetes in production

Knowledge of CDC patterns and tools (Debezium) and database connectors at scale

Multi-region architectures, cluster linking strategies, and disaster recovery drills

Company

Selby Jennings

Glassdoor3.4

Global recruitment firm specialising in Banking

Founded in 2004

New York, New York, USA

1001-5000 employees

http://www.selbyjennings.com/

Funding

Current Stage

Late Stage

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