Technical Product Owner – Kafka Data Streaming

We are looking for a highly technical product owner to own the design, deployment, and operations of our enterprise data streaming platform, with a primary focus on Confluent Kafka infrastructure on Azure and Google Cloud Platform. This is not a traditional product owner role, and it demands deep hands-on expertise in Kafka platform administration, cloud-native Kafka deployments, stream processing infrastructure, and CDC patterns.

• Own the product backlog: decompose epics and business vision into well-defined, developer-ready features and engineering specifications for the streaming platform.
• Expected to deeply understand the "what”, the business intent and streaming use case, and independently derive a very detailed and technical "how”, the infrastructure design, deployment architecture, and engineering specifications ready for the development team.
• Lead the design and buildout of Confluent Kafka infrastructure on Azure and Google Cloud Platform, ensuring enterprise-grade scalability, resilience, and security.
• Define and govern real-time streaming and event-driven architecture patterns adopted across all application and data teams.
• Drive and own ceremonies of SAFe Agile / LPM, including PI planning, iteration planning, backlog refinement, and other ceremonies.
• Must be hands-on technical with the ability to independently write proof-of-concepts (POCs) and reference implementations to guide and accelerate the development team.
• Own Kafka platform administration standards including cluster configuration, topic design, consumer group strategies, schema governance, and data retention policies.
• Build and govern CDC pipelines using Debezium and Kafka Connect, including source and sink connector development and operations.
• Experience building and operationalizing Kafka clusters on Kubernetes using Confluent for Kubernetes, including deployment, scaling, configuration, and day-2 operations
• Experience deploying and configuring Confluent Platform using Ansible playbooks, including cluster provisioning, configuration management, and automated upgrades.
• Define and enforce cloud networking standards for Kafka infrastructure including private networking, and security controls.
• Align cross-functional stakeholders on streaming platform roadmap, architectural tradeoffs, and delivery priorities
• Own capacity management of the streaming platform, including resource planning, scaling strategies, and performance optimization
• Experience with traffic throttling and workload governance using Kafka quotas across producers and consumers
• Experience designing and implementing Kafka disaster recovery patterns, including multi-region replication and failover strategies
• Experience with Confluent Platform Cluster Linking for cross-cluster and cross-region data replication
• Experience building diverse source and sink connector data pipelines using Kafka Connect across a variety of enterprise systems and data stores
• Experience building and managing multi-tenant Flink infrastructure, enabling isolated and secure stream processing workloads across multiple teams and use cases
• Define stream processing infrastructure patterns using Confluent Flink and guide teams in building real-time processing pipelines

Technical Skills Required