Kafka Engineer

Lead Kafka Engineer | 6 month contract | Inside IR35

On site/off site: Hybrid working (2 days per week in London)

The client

My client is a newly created regulatory technology business that brings global financial institutions together to optimise standards in compliance, by providing a trusted platform to exchange and enhance information.

Initially delivering sanctions transactions screening, my client’s product changes the way financial crime is tackled by partnering with leading financial institutions and trusted industry partners to deliver effective and efficient screening.

Backed by an industry consortium of financial service market leaders and equipped with decades of industry experience and advanced technologies, my client’s product will redefine how compliance can be delivered.

The role

This is a new and exciting opportunity within my client’s technology team, leading the development and delivery of their central platform’s Kafka streaming services. Reporting to the Delivery Manager.

You will define and own the technical road map for their Kafka services and ensure that capacity planning, tuning and performance planning is undertaken in line with the platform’s projected Growth. Working closely with the architecture team and engineering teams, you will be subject matter expert for this technology, ensuring best practice configuration in order to meet with business and security needs.

What you’ll do

Key responsibilities in this role will include (but not be limited to):

* leading the detailed design, engineering and implementation of Kafka streaming services within the platform

* Providing expert knowledge and advice to the senior technical management team

* Acting as mentor and subject matter expert to the technical engineering teams

* Establish, communicate and advocate best practice and design patterns for Kafka consumption in our business

* Defining and owning the technical road map for Kafka service, ensuring the provision and operation of a performant, resilient and secure solution, aligned to growing business needs

* Working closely with Information security and governance teams in ensuring that compliance and internal controls requirements are met

* Working with the Platform teams and delivery partner teams to install, configure and operationalise Kafka deployments

* Producing detailed designs for approval by the Design Authority

* Owning and developing the technical relationship and ways of working with Kafka vendors.

What you’ll need

* 6-8 years of relevant experience in an Engineering role with demonstrable experience in Apache/Confluent Kafka technologies, and event-driven micro services, in a highly distributed enterprise environment.

* Strong operational knowledge and background in running Kafka clusters at scale

* Experience working in the Financial Services sector or a large complex and/or global environment

* Expert-level implementation skills with Java 11 and above using SOLID principles

* Hands-on experience in using Java Spring Boot, Spring for Apache Kafka, and Spring Cloud

Stream with Kafka and Streams

* comfortable in using Spring Reactive programming, Threads, and Annotation processors

* Experience in developing for and deploying public cloud products, especially to AWS EKS Kubernetes environment.

* Understanding of cloud security concepts and technologies

* Comfortable in using different Linux environments e.g. Redhat

* Confluent Kafka admin and developer certification preferred

* Experience of working in Agile/Scrum with virtual teams

* Experience in DevOps, scrum/agile methodologies and using CI/CD tools such as Github, Jenkins and Terraform.

Personal competencies

* A pro-active issue and risk management approach

* You will have excellent social and organizational skills, able to handle diverse situations, multiple initiatives, and changing priorities

* A self-starter, able to work independently and multi-task

* Exhibit a continuous improvement mentality

* Analytic and diagnostic skills with high attention to detail

* Display and maintain a collaborative approach to working with vendors and colleagues

* Self-motivated with a desire to learn, ensuring that your skills are kept up to date with the latest development of technologies in this space.

* Keen interest in working in a fast-paced and future-oriented multicultural environment

* Willingness to travel to Delivery partner sites

* Able to work in a hybrid model split between office and remote