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
R750,000 - R760,000 (R750 Thousand - R760 Thousand)
Minimum experience
13+ years
Posted
29th October, 2026
Required skills
Apache KafkaConfluent PlatformConfluent CloudKafka ReplicationInfrastructure as CodeTerraformAWSGCPCI/CD
About the company
Worldhire is a global hiring and talent discovery company that helps organizations identify, engage, and hire experienced professionals across international markets. With expertise in executive search, leadership hiring, specialist recruitment, contract hiring, talent advisory, and cross-border talent acquisition, Worldhire serves businesses across more than 50 countries through its offices in the UK, US, and India, supported by a global partner network. The company is evolving into a platform-led talent ecosystem built around **KORUM**, a confidential and consent-led talent discovery platform, **Sphere**, a recruitment technology solution for structured hiring workflows, and **Select**, its advisory-led executive search practice. Worldhire's mission is to connect serious talent with meaningful opportunities while ensuring privacy, trust, and relevance throughout the hiring process.
About the role
Role - Senior Confluent Kafka Migration Engineer
5 days Onsite (Only Work from Office)
Office Location - Midrand, 1685, South Africa
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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