Kafka Engineer Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Senior Kafka Engineer, Enterprise Data Engineering

We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Senior Infrastructure Engineer to join our Enterprise Data Engineering team. This full-time role is ideal for candidates with hands-on experience in infrastructure technologies, Apache Kafka including Confluent Kafka and Kafka Streams, MQ, SQL and NoSQL databases, and cloud engineering. If you are passionate about building efficient, scalable platforms, we would love to hear from you.

Locations & Work Arrangement: Candidates must be willing to commute to one of the following hub locations with a hybrid schedule of four days onsite and one day remote per week with flexibility:

• Phoenix, AZ
• Johnston, RI - One Citizens Bank Way
• Westwood, MA - 200 Station Drive
• Iselin, NJ
• Plano, TX

Key Responsibilities
Lead a team of engineers and technicians in monitoring, diagnosing, and resolving infrastructure issues using event-based management
Administer and troubleshoot Kafka clusters, including configuration and performance tuning
Integrate Kafka with various systems using connectors such as MQ, MongoDB, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL
Automate infrastructure setup across environments using Terraform
Provide senior-level support and troubleshooting across a wide range of technologies
Collaborate within agile teams to drive modern development practices and product vision
Serve as the primary point of contact for daily operations and incident management
Conduct proactive monitoring to identify and mitigate potential service disruptions
Document actions, create reports, and establish escalation procedures
Audit support tickets to identify patterns and reduce downtime
Ensure compliance with internal policies and industry standards
Develop and maintain runbooks and playbooks for operational excellence

Required Qualifications
7 or more years of experience in Kafka administration on-prem and cloud, messaging systems, and database integration
Proficiency with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, event-driven architecture, DevOps, and containerization
Experience deploying Kafka clients and brokers in production and disaster recovery environments
Proven ability to scale Kafka clusters and connector infrastructure
Hands-on experience building real-time data pipelines using Kafka producers and Spark Streaming consumers
Familiarity with monitoring tools such as Splunk, Datadog, and Grafana
Strong knowledge of source control systems such as SVN and Git
Solid understanding of networking protocols, operating systems, and diagnostic tools
Proficiency in scripting languages such as PowerShell, Bash, Python, and Perl
Strong analytical and decision-making skills, even with limited information
Ability to work independently and track issues to identify trends
Excellent communication and customer service skills
Sound judgment and autonomy in handling both emergency and routine situations
Experience collaborating with technical teams for issue resolution

Desired Qualifications
Experience with monitoring tools
Working experience in the financial services industry

Education and Certifications
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electronics Engineering
Work Schedule: Monday through Friday
Hybrid: 4 days on site and 1 day remote

Pay Transparency

The salary range for this position is $125,000-155,000 per year, plus an opportunity to earn an annual discretionary bonus. Actual pay is based on various factors including but not limited to the work location, and relevant skills and experience.  

We offer competitive pay, comprehensive medical, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits, maternity/paternity leave, flexible work arrangements, education reimbursement, wellness programs and more. Note, Citizens' paid time off policy exceeds the mandatory, paid sick or paid time-away policy of very local and state jurisdiction in the United States. For an overview of our benefits, visit https://jobs.citizensbank.com/benefits.

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