Overview
Skills
Job Details
Job Title: Kafka Implementation Engineer (Remote)
Location: Remote
Duration: Long-term Contract
Role Overview
Our client is looking for a Kafka Implementation Engineer with deep Confluent Kafka experience to lead Kafka setup, advise on architecture, and support global adoption. This is a technical leadership role, part hands-on, part mentorship, part advisory. You'll work directly with teams to stand up Kafka environments, troubleshoot complex issues, and serve as the go-to escalation point. This role is ideal for someone who knows how Kafka fits into enterprise systems and has helped clients move from zero to production.
Key Responsibilities
- Set up and configure new Kafka environments (Confluent or open source) from the ground up.
- Design and advise on Kafka messaging flows that support real-time alerting for banking operations.
- Guide internal teams on Kafka best practices, tuning, and operational readiness.
- Act as a senior technical advisor-consulting on use cases, architecture choices, and scaling strategies.
- Provide mentorship and hands-on support to engineering teams during Kafka adoption.
- Be the escalation point for Kafka-related issues across dev and production environments.
- Help drive Kafka enablement across Santander's global footprint, particularly in Spain.
Required Skills & Experience
- Strong hands-on experience with Confluent Kafka: setup, development, tuning, and monitoring.
- Proven experience implementing Kafka in enterprise environments, including alerting and observability use cases.
- Clear understanding of Kafka internals: topics, partitions, consumer groups, replication, retention, etc.
- Experience mentoring and advising engineers and architects on Kafka strategy and troubleshooting.
- Familiarity with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Kafka Streams or ksqlDB is a plus.
- Able to work independently and collaborate across distributed global teams.
Nice to Have
- Banking or financial services experience.
- Experience working with international teams (Spain in particular).
- Familiarity with cloud-native Kafka deployments (e.g., Confluent Cloud, Azure Event Hubs for Kafka).