Confluent Kafka Engineer

🚀 WE’RE HIRING: CONFLUENT KAFKA MIGRATION ENGINEER

📍 Location: Gauteng or Cape Town

🏢 Work Model: Hybrid – 3 days onsite per week

📄 Employment Type: Contract

📅 Contract Period: November 2026 – March 2027, with potential extension

👥 Positions Available: 2

About the Opportunity

We are seeking highly experienced Confluent Kafka Migration Engineers to support a large-scale enterprise migration from an on-premises Confluent Platform to Confluent Cloud.

This opportunity is suited to hands-on Kafka specialists with proven experience delivering complex cloud migration projects, maintaining data integrity, modernising authentication, and implementing secure, scalable event-streaming environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, configure and provision Confluent Cloud environments across Development, Pre-Production and Production.
• Migrate Kafka topics, schemas, ACLs, Kafka Connect connectors and service credentials from on-premises environments to Confluent Cloud.
• Implement and manage Cluster Linking, data replication, schema validation and consumer offset mapping.
• Configure private cloud networking, including AWS PrivateLink, GCP Private Service Connect and VPC Peering.
• Develop infrastructure automation using Terraform, GitOps and CI/CD pipelines.
• Modernise Kafka authentication, transitioning from Kerberos to supported authentication methods such as API Keys, OAuth and mTLS.
• Implement monitoring, telemetry, consumer lag tracking and audit logging.
• Support cloud migration and regional transition activities while maintaining data integrity and application connectivity.

Essential Requirements

• Diploma in Information Technology, Engineering or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of hands-on Kafka engineering experience.
• Recent practical experience working with Confluent Cloud.
• Proven experience delivering at least one on-premises Confluent Platform to Confluent Cloud migration.
• Strong experience with Apache Kafka, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry and Cluster Linking.
• Practical experience with offset mapping and data migration validation.
• Strong knowledge of Terraform, preferably including the Confluent Terraform provider, GitOps and CI/CD automation.
• Experience with private cloud networking and hybrid connectivity.
• Strong understanding of Kafka security, including Kerberos/SASL, RBAC, SSO, API Keys, OAuth and mTLS.
• Ability to provide project references demonstrating previous Kafka migration experience.

Advantageous Experience

• Confluent Certified Administrator or Developer for Apache Kafka.
• AWS or Google Cloud Platform experience or certification.
• Telecommunications or large enterprise project experience.
• Experience developing Kafka authentication proxy or translation layers.
• Scripting experience using Bash or Python.

Please note: Candidates must have demonstrable, hands-on migration experience. General Kafka support or administration experience alone will not be sufficient.

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