Specialist Platform Engineer at Absa Bank Limited

Job Summary

• We are looking for an engineer to join our team to help build and maintain Kafka-based  streaming applications and support the Kafka platform across on-prem and Confluent Cloud  environments. The role is a hybrid of development, platform responsibilities, and observability,  providing a unique opportunity to work on distributed systems at scale.

Job Description

Core Responsibilities: 

• Develop, maintain, and optimize Kafka-based applications and event streaming pipelines using Java (Spring / Spring Boot), Python, or .NET. 
• Work with distributed systems concepts: partitions, replication, fault-tolerance, scaling, and event-driven architectures. 
• Contribute to provisioning, managing, and securing Kafka clusters both on-prem and in Confluent Cloud. 
• Implement and maintain security and authorization mechanisms, including ACLs, Kerberos, SSL, and OAuth for Confluent Cloud. 
• Automate infrastructure deployment and configuration using Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation, Docker, or Kubernetes. 
• Configure, monitor, and maintain observability for Kafka clusters, including metrics, alerts, and dashboards (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Confluent Control Center, ElasticSearch). 
• Assist in troubleshooting production issues and perform root cause analysis. 
• Collaborate closely with developers, DevOps/SRE teams, and other stakeholders to ensure reliable and performant streaming systems. 
• Contribute to best practices for connector configuration, high availability, disaster recovery, and performance tuning, including streaming applications and pipelines built with Kafka Streams, ksqlDB, Apache Flink, and TableFlow.

Required Skills: 

• Strong programming experience in Java(Spring / Spring Boot), Python, or .NET. Ability to write clean, maintainable, and performant code. 
• Solid understanding of distributed systems principles and event-driven architectures. 
• Hands-on experience with Kafka in production or strong ability to learn quickly. 
• Knowledge of Kafka ecosystem components (Connect, Schema Registry, KSQL, MirrorMaker, Control Center, Kafka Streams, Apache Flink, TableFlow) is a plus. 
• Familiarity with security best practices for Kafka, including ACLs, Kerberos, SSL, and OAuth. 
• Experience with infrastructure as code and containerized environments. 
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools for distributed systems.

Desirable Skills / Bonus Points: 

• Experience with Confluent Cloud or other managed Kafka platforms.
• Experience with AWS 
• Experience building streaming pipelines across multiple systems and environments. 
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and automated deployments. 

Behavioural / Soft Skills: 

• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills. 
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills. 
• Ability to work independently and prioritize across multiple BAU and project tasks. 
• Product-minded approach, focusing on delivering value and scalable solutions.