Support Engineer – Kafka

Required Skills & Experience for Kafka

 Basic understanding of OpenShift basics (pods, deployments, services, routes/ingress,

namespaces, logs, events).

 Experience 3 – 5 years

 Solid Understanding of Kafka operations: topics, partitions, producers/consumers,

offsets, consumer groups.

 Basic Understanding of ActiveMQ JMS Address/Queue, Address settings (DLQ, expiry

queue, redelivery delay)

 Familiar with Strimzi/AMQ Streams CRs (Kafka, KafkaTopic, KafkaUser) and Operator

lifecycle.

 Proficiency with CLI tools: oc, kubectl, Kafka CLI, AMQ CLI ,reading pod logs and events.

 Kafka and AMQ Console Hands-on.

 Understanding of monitoring & alerting workflows, ticket lifecycle, SLAs.

 Strong communication, documentation, and shift-handover discipline.

 Strong troubleshooting for ISR/URP, leader election, rebalance, lag, and

broker/storage/network issues.

 Experience with Kafka Connect, Kafka Bridge, and connector operations, Kafka Mirror

 Security: TLS/mTLS, SASL/SCRAM, OAuth/OIDC (Keycloak), cert rotation, RBAC,

network policies.

 Lead complex incident resolution (broker instability, partition reassignments, consumer

lag spikes, connectivity/auth failures).

 Perform RCA, impact analysis, and preventive actions.

 Tune broker/topic configs (retention, cleanup policy, partitions, replication factors).

 Plan and execute capacity upgrades, scaling, and storage adjustments.

 Manage AMQ Streams/Strimzi versions, CRD updates, rolling upgrades of Kafka

components; validate post-change health.

 Observability: Designing Prometheus alerts, Grafana dashboards, log pipelines

(EFK/Loki), capacity/performance baselining.