DevOps Engineer

Location: Manchester, UK

Type: Contract (inside ir35)

About the Role

We are seeking two experienced Kafka DevOps Engineers to join our Streaming Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Manchester. You will play a key role in delivering, enhancing, and supporting enterprise-scale streaming services that enable real-time data ingestion, event-driven architectures, and highly available multi-region streaming capabilities.

Working within the Track400 Streaming CoE Lab, you will help build and harden Streaming-as-a-Service platforms, ensuring they remain secure, scalable, reliable, and performant for critical business workloads

Key Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, manage, and optimise enterprise Kafka platforms
• Support real-time streaming solutions and event-driven architectures across multiple environments
• Configure and manage Kafka clusters, topics, partitions, replication, and consumer groups
• Perform platform upgrades, scaling activities, failover testing, and capacity planning
• Troubleshoot Kafka performance issues including consumer lag, ISR challenges, broker issues, and throughput bottlenecks
• Implement and maintain Kafka security controls including SSL/TLS, authentication, encryption, and ACLs
• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines to automate deployments and platform changes
• Manage Kubernetes-based deployments using Helm and GitOps practices
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and observability solutions to improve platform reliability
• Collaborate with engineering, infrastructure, and application teams to support streaming initiatives and operational excellence
• Drive continuous improvement through automation, standardisation, and operational best practices

Required Skills & Experience

Kafka & Streaming Platforms (Essential)

• Apache
• Kafka
• Connect
• Schema Registry
• Kafka Streams
• ZooKeeper and/or KRaft
• Deep understanding of :Brokers, topics, partitions, and replication
• Consumer groups and offset management
• Retention policies and throughput optimisation
• Cluster setup, scaling, upgrades, and disaster recovery
• Performance tuning and troubleshooting
• Experience implementing Kafka security controls
• SSL/TLSACLs
• Authentication and encryption

DevOps & Automation (Essential)

• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using:
• Jenkins
• GitHub Actions
• Azure DevOps
• Infrastructure and deployment automation experience.
• Knowledge of configuration management tools such as:
• Terraform
• Ansible

Kubernetes & Container Platforms (Essential)

• Strong Kubernetes administration and operational experience.
• Experience with:
• Helm
• ArgoCD
• GitOps methodologies
• ConfigMaps and Secrets management
• Certificate management
• Rolling deployments and scaling strategies

Cloud Platforms (Essential)

• Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform:
• AWS
• Microsoft Azure
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Monitoring, Observability & Reliability (Essential)

• Experience with:
• Prometheus
• Grafana
• Dynatrace
• Confluent Control Center
• Strong understanding of:
• Monitoring and alerting
• Incident management
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles

Desirable Experience

• Multi-region Kafka deployments.
• Enterprise Streaming-as-a-Service platforms.
• Large-scale event-driven architectures.
• Platform engineering and reliability engineering practices.
• Financial services or other highly regulated environments.

What You'll Be Working On

The Streaming CoE is responsible for delivering and hardening enterprise Kafka-based streaming services that support:

• Real-time data ingestion
• Event-driven data flows
• Multi-region, highly available streaming platforms
• Mission-critical IBS and CAT-A workloads
• Platform optimisation and reliability initiatives
• Operational support and continuous improvement of Streaming-as-a-Service tooling