Kafka Platform Engineer

About the Company At Avaron, you get the security of permanent employment combined with the variety of working at different customers. We place specialists across everything from tech, IT and industry to project management and business support – and whatever the assignment, you have a consultant manager who is there for you and your development. About the Role You will help strengthen integration capabilities used by multiple development teams in a large retail environment. The focus is on building, operating, and continuously improving messaging and integration platforms with full operational ownership. You will work hands-on with Kafka clusters and HiveMQ, driving platform stability, automation, self-service, and secure, scalable operations across a modern Kubernetes-based landscape. This role suits you who enjoy combining platform engineering, DevOps, and integration in a setting where reliability, governance, and performance matter. It is a great opportunity to influence how critical platform services are designed, automated, and used at scale. Job DescriptionYou will design, deploy, and maintain multi-cluster, multi-region Apache Kafka environments on Kubernetes, together with enterprise HiveMQ brokers. You will drive upgrades for Kafka, Strimzi, and HiveMQ, coordinate patching, and reduce CVE exposure without disrupting applications. You will develop and maintain custom Kafka connectors for data flows between legacy systems and cloud environments. You will define scaling strategies, node affinity rules, topology spread constraints, and persistent volume setups for IOPS-intensive workloads. You will manage partition layouts, topic compaction, retention behavior, and cluster-wide resource allocation to support stability and performance. You will design high-availability and disaster recovery strategies, including cross-region replication and automated failover. You will strengthen security and governance through Schema Registries, Kafka ACLs, SASL structures, OAuth/OIDC validation paths, mTLS, SSL, SASL/SCRAM, and RBAC. You will build observability and alerting with Prometheus and Grafana, perform root cause analysis, and create guardrails that prevent recurring incidents. You will support development teams with reusable CI/CD pipelines, Helm-based packaging, self-service tooling, and guidance for Java and Spring Boot messaging patterns. You will contribute at platform level across incident, problem, and change management together with security, architecture, and development teams. Requirements4–6 years of experience with Apache Kafka, Strimzi, Kafka Connect API, Kraft. 4–6 years of experience working with Java and Spring Boot Framework. Experience with PostgreSQL. Strong experience with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Linux experience (including WSL). GitHub Actions and ArgoCD. Knowledge of Splunk, Fluent Bit and Helm. CI/CD using GitHub Actions and/or Jenkins. Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or equivalent). Experience with Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, and Fluent Bit or OpenTelemetry. Apache Kafka at platform level (clusters, performance, security). Experience with HiveMQ broker. Nice to haveExperience in APIM platforms. Experience in Azure, AWS or Google cloud. Cloud cost optimization experience. Experience of working at an integration department in large enterprise environments. What We OfferPermanent employment at Avaron AB Occupational pension Wellness allowance of SEK 5,000 per year Application Selections are made on an ongoing basis – apply as soon as you can.