Senior Confluent Kafka Migration Engineer
Worldhire Global
Posted by a Verified Recruiter
Industry
IT Services and IT Consulting
Location
Midrand, South Africa
Work mode
On-site
Job type
Contract
Annual salary
Not disclosed
Minimum experience
7+ years
Posted
30th October, 2026
Required skills
Apache KafkaConfluent PlatformConfluent CloudKafka ReplicationInfrastructure as CodeTerraformAWSGCPKafka SecurityCI/CD
About the company
WorldHire is a global talent acquisition and executive search firm that helps companies hire top talent across multiple industries and geographies. We partner with startups, mid-sized businesses, and global enterprises to identify, assess, and recruit professionals for leadership, technical, and business-critical roles. Our focus is on delivering high-quality talent through a consultative and efficient hiring process, ensuring the right fit for both clients and candidates.
About the role
Role - Senior Confluent Kafka Migration Engineer
5 days Onsite (Only Work from Office)
Office Location - Midrand, 1685, South Africa
Open for Fixed Term Employment and Contracts
Role Overview
We are looking for an experienced Senior Confluent Kafka Migration Engineer to support the migration of a large-scale, on-premises Confluent Platform environment to Confluent Cloud. The resource will be responsible for migration planning, cloud environment configuration, secure network connectivity, Kafka data replication, authentication modernization, production cutovers, and post-migration stabilization.
The role requires strong hands-on expertise in Apache Kafka, Confluent Platform, Confluent Cloud and enterprise-scale production migrations, with a focus on data integrity, high availability, security and minimal service interruption.
Roles and Responsibilities
- Assess the existing on-premises Kafka and Confluent Platform environment and validate the target cloud architecture.
- Develop detailed migration strategies, wave-based execution plans, cutover runbooks rollback procedures, and risk mitigation plans.
- Provision and configure Confluent Cloud environments for development, pre-production and production.
- Configure Kafka topics, partitions, replication, Schema Registry subjects, ACLs, service accounts and Kafka Connect connectors.
- Implement and manage Confluent Cluster Linking for replication and migration of Kafka workloads from on-premises to cloud.
- Validate data consistency, schema compatibility, consumer offsets, application connectivity and message processing before and after migration.
- Configure secure private connectivity between on-premises data centres and cloud environments using AWS PrivateLink, GCP Private Service Connect, VPC peering, or equivalent technologies.
- Modernize Kafka client authentication by migrating from Kerberos-based authentication to supported mechanisms such as API keys, OAuth, or mutual TLS (mTLS), as applicable to the target architecture.
- Collaborate with application teams to update Kafka client configurations, libraries, and authentication settings.
- Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform and automate platform provisioning and configuration through CI/CD pipelines.
- Configure monitoring, alerting, audit logging, consumer lag tracking, and performance dashboards using enterprise observability tools.
- Troubleshoot Kafka replication, connectivity, throughput, partitioning, consumer lag and production performance issues.
- Execute production cutovers in planned waves, validate workload functionality, and
maintain rollback readiness.
- Support hypercare, operational handover, knowledge transfer, and decommissioning of legacy Kafka infrastructure after successful migration.
Must-Have Skills:
- Strong hands-on experience with Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform administration.
- Proven experience in enterprise-scale Kafka migrations from on-premises environments to cloud-managed platforms.
- Practical experience with Confluent Cloud architecture, configuration, administration, and operations.
- Hands-on experience with Confluent Cluster Linking and Kafka replication strategies.
- Strong understanding of Kafka topics, partitions, replication factors, consumer groups, offsets, and high-availability configurations.
- Experience with Confluent Schema Registry, schema compatibility, Kafka Connect,
connectors, ACLs, and service accounts.
- Knowledge of Kafka security and authentication mechanisms, including Kerberos, SASL, TLS, API keys, OAuth, or mTLS.
- Experience with AWS or GCP cloud services, private networking, and secure connectivity.
- Hands-on experience with Terraform or other Infrastructure as Code tools and CI/CD automation.
- Experience with production cutovers, rollback planning, disaster recovery, monitoring, and incident troubleshooting.
- Strong understanding of data integrity, performance optimization, security controls, and operational readiness.
- Ability to coordinate with application development, cloud infrastructure, security,
networking, and operations teams.
Good-to-Have Skills:
- Experience with migration of Confluent Platform to Confluent Cloud Enterprise clusters.
- Knowledge of Apache Flink architecture, stream-processing concepts, and Kafka-Flink integration.
- Exposure to multi-cloud or cross-region Kafka migration strategies.
- Experience with AWS PrivateLink, GCP Private Service Connect, VPC peering, VPN, or Direct Connect.
- Knowledge of ksqlDB, Tableflow, and Confluent Cloud governance capabilities.
- Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Instana, or similar observability tools.
- Knowledge of Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, GitOps, and cloud-native deployment practices.
- Experience with managed streaming services and enterprise event-driven architectures.
- Confluent Certified Developer or Administrator for Apache Kafka certification.
- AWS or GCP cloud certification and HashiCorp Terraform Associate certification.
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