Senior Platform Engineer, Kafka and Streaming Data

Job Description

Ready to take your career global?

Make your mark at one of the biggest names in payments.

We're looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to join our Enterprise Data Platform Engineering team and build our new streaming data platform. This is a hands-on role from day one. You will lead complex technical work on the platform, be accountable for delivering it, and advise other engineers. We are building a shared platform on Apache Kafka for the whole company. It carries payment events in real time to applications, to the data lake and to services that need the current state of that data with low latency. You will build Kafka across regions, write the Terraform and pipelines that build every environment, build the stream processing that protects card data, and automate the setup of topics, access and schemas. The team is small, and everyone builds. In your first year you will help stand up the platform in production, onboard the first teams and start moving existing Kafka workloads onto it. You will share the platform on-call rotation.

What you'll own

• The platform's core, delivered in code: Kafka clusters across regions, schema registry and data contracts, connectors and change data capture, stream processing jobs, delivery into Apache Iceberg tables, and real-time serving to applications.

• Self-service for product teams, built as platform services: topic as a service, schema as a service and self-service ingestion of new data sources, with templates for the patterns teams are allowed to use, all delivered through Terraform modules, CI/CD pipelines and guardrails as code.

• Card-data protection, built in. You build and run the streaming encryption module: a stream processing application on Kafka that encrypts or tokenizes card fields in flight through the company's tokenization service. You also build in keys, access control and audit evidence.

• The move onto the platform: live Kafka workloads moved without downtime with the teams that produce and read the data, and existing self-managed Kafka kept running well until it retires.

• Production operations: monitoring and alerting against service objectives, load and failover tests, capacity planning, runbooks, and finding the cause of incidents.

What you'll bring

• Strong, hands-on Apache Kafka in production. You have run clusters, tuned them and fixed problems under load. You have built pipelines with Kafka Connect and change data capture, and replicated data between clusters.

• Kafka on Kubernetes. You have deployed and run self-managed Kafka on Kubernetes through automation and infrastructure as code, including upgrades, scaling and recovery.

• Strong programming skills with solid Kafka knowledge. You write production code in Java with the Kafka clients, Kafka Streams or Apache Flink. You can build platform functionality such as an encryption module: an application that transforms every event in flight by calling an external service and handles failures without losing data.

• Strong cloud engineering on AWS or Google Cloud. You know networking and private connectivity, identity and access, encryption, and key and secrets management.

• Infrastructure as code as a daily practice. You write, review and test Terraform modules, build and rebuild environments from code, put guardrails in code, and turn approved patterns into reusable templates.

• DevOps and automation. You have built CI/CD pipelines, automated operations and self-service platform services, such as topic and schema provisioning and data ingestion, with monitoring and alerting built in.

• Technical delivery. You have led complex technical initiatives from design to production, advised other engineers, written runbooks and supported what you built on call.

It's a bonus if you have

• Experience in payments or another regulated industry, especially with card-data security such as encryption, tokenization or PCI DSS.

• Certifications: Confluent Certified Administrator for Apache Kafka or Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka, and AWS or Google Cloud certifications.

• Contributions to open-source Apache Kafka or related projects.

• Experience with a managed Kafka service, Apache Iceberg, low-latency data serving or distributed NoSQL databases.

EEOC Statement

Global Payments is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, genetic information, national origin, disability, veteran status, and other protected characteristics. The EEO is the Law poster is available here.

If you are made a conditional offer of employment and will be working in the United States, you will be required to undergo a drug test. In developing this job description care was taken to include all competencies and requirements needed to successfully perform the position. Reasonable accommodations will be provided for individuals with qualified disabilities both during the hiring process, as well as to allow the individual to perform the essential functions of the job, if hired.

Washington Candidates: Click here for information on the Fair Chance Act.

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About Us

At Global Payments (NYSE : GPN), we empower simple, fast, secure payments for everyone. And to do that, we’ve built a complete, worldwide commerce ecosystem that delivers software and services at scale to millions of companies around the world—from ambitious startups to global enterprises.

Our team of 27,000 experts is dedicated to your success. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, we're a Fortune 500® company and a member of the S&P 500 with worldwide reach spanning North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. Wherever you are—or wherever you want to be—we’re there, ready to support you.

For more information, visit company.globalpayments.com and follow Global Payments on X, LinkedIn and Facebook.

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EEOC Statement:

Global Payments Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. Global Payments provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, veteran status, genetic information or any other basis protected by law. Those applicants requiring reasonable accommodation to the application and/or interview process should notify jobs@globalpayments.com.