Kafka Tier 3 Support Engineer

Must Have Technical/Functional Skills Kafka & Streaming

• Strong hands on experience with Apache Kafka
• Experience supporting at least one of: o AWS MSK o Confluent Platform / Confluent Cloud o Self managed Kafka (VM or Kubernetes)
• Deep understanding of: o Brokers, partitions, replication, ISR, leader election o Consumer groups and rebalancing o Producer/consumer internals and failure modes Operations & Performance
• Expertise in diagnosing: o Consumer lag and throughput bottlenecks o Broker disk, network, and JVM performance o Metadata and controller instability
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools (Kafka metrics, CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, etc.) Security & Governance
• Knowledge of Kafka security concepts: o TLS, authentication (IAM/SASL/SCRAM), ACLs/RBAC o Principle of least privilege
• Experience supporting regulated or multi tenant environments Preferred / Nice to Have Skills
• Experience with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, or streaming frameworks
• Exposure to KRaft-based Kafka deployments
• Cloud platforms (AWS preferred; Azure/GCP beneficial)
• Automation and IaC experience for Kafka operations
• Experience in SRE or DevOps-aligned environments Roles & Responsibilities Key Responsibilities 1. Tier 3 Incident Management & Escalation Support
• Act as the highest technical escalation point for Kafka production incidents (Sev 1 / Sev 2).
• Lead deep troubleshooting across: o Broker instability, controller elections, ISR shrinkage o Under replicated partitions and leader imbalance o Producer/consumer failures, lag spikes, and rebalance storms o Disk, network, JVM, and request handler saturation
• Provide hands on remediation for complex issues, including: o Partition reassignment and leader rebalance o Broker configuration tuning o Throttle/quota strategies for noisy producers or consumers
• Coordin ate with vendor support during service incidents, providing logs, metrics, and forensic details.
• Guide Tier 2 teams during major incidents and validate restoration actions. 2. Kafka Performance Engineering & Optimization
• Analyze Kafka workloads for performance and scalability risks: o Partition skew and hot partitions o Inefficient producer batching/compression o Consumer lag root cause analysis o Thread pool, I/O, and network bottlenecks
• Recommend and validate: o Topic design (partition count, replication factor, retention, compaction) o Producer and consumer configuration best practices o Quotas, quotas enforcement, and multi tenant controls
• Support onboarding of high throughput or latency sensitive workloads, ensuring Kafka is correctly sized and tuned. 3. Platform Stability, Reliability & Resilience
• Diagnose and resolve systemic Kafka stability issues: o Repeated broker failures or flapping o Metadata/controller instability (Zookeeper or KRaft) o Recovery issues following failovers or maintenance events
• Support resilience initiatives: o Multi AZ cluster health validation o Replication and DR strategies (MirrorMaker 2, Replicator, or app level DR patterns) o Failover testing and validation
• Define and improve Kafka SLOs for availability, durability, and latency. 4. Change, Upgrade & Configuration Leadership
• Lead medium to high risk Kafka changes, including: o Broker and cluster configuration changes o Partition expansion or large scale reassignment o Topic policy changes impacting durability or performance
• Support and plan: o Kafka version upgrades o MSK / Confluent upgrade cycles o Client compatibility and rollout strategies
• Participate in CAB reviews, assess risk, and design rollback and validation plans. 5. Root Cause Analysis & Continuous Improvement
• Own RCA documentation for major incidents with clear corrective and preventive actions (CAPA).
• Identify recurring failure patterns and architectural gaps.
• Re commend platform-level improvements: o Automation opportunities o Guardrails and standards o Monitoring and alerting enhancements
• Contribute to continuous improvement of runbooks, knowledge base articles, and operational playbooks. 6. Mentorship & Collaboration
• Provide technical guidance and mentoring to Tier 2 Kafka support teams.
• Collaborate with: o Application teams on Kafka client usage and best practices o Platform and SRE teams on capacity planning and reliability engineering o Security teams on access control, encryption, and compliance requirements Act as a subject matter expert for Kafka within the organization.

Salary Range $120,000-$140,000 years

TCS Employee Benefits Summary:

Discretionary Annual Incentive.

Comprehensive Medical Coverage:

Medical & Health, Dental & Vision, Disability Planning & Insurance, Pet Insurance Plans.

Family Support:

Maternal & Parental Leaves.

Insurance Options:

Auto & Home Insurance, Identity Theft Protection.

Convenience & Professional Growth:

Commuter Benefits & Certification & amp; Training Reimbursement.

Time Off:

Vacation, Time Off, Sick Leave & Holidays.

Legal & Financial Assistance:

Legal Assistance, 401K Plan, Performance Bonus, College Fund, Student Loan Refinancing. #LI-SP1