Job Overview

Atos is hiring a Senior Kafka Administrator for a senior platform engineering opportunity focused on Apache Kafka and enterprise event-streaming systems. The role is intended for an experienced technology professional who has operated large-scale Kafka environments in production and can combine hands-on administration with platform architecture, reliability engineering, automation, and long-term technology planning.

The position requires strong practical ownership of mission-critical Kafka platforms supporting high-throughput and low-latency event streaming. The successful candidate will work with multi-cluster environments, distributed systems, hybrid infrastructure, cloud platforms, and Kubernetes. The role also involves shaping an enterprise event-streaming roadmap while remaining deeply involved in cluster operations, troubleshooting, performance optimization, observability, and operational governance.

The role is based in India and the listed role locations are Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai, while the Atos job listing identifies Pune as the publication location. The working shift is stated as 6:00 PM IST to 3:00 AM IST.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and administer enterprise Apache Kafka platforms across large-scale production environments.
• Contribute to Kafka platform architecture, cluster design, capacity planning, availability, resilience, and operational standards.
• Manage Kafka environments containing large numbers of brokers and partitions and supporting substantial data retention requirements.
• Analyze and improve throughput, latency, partition distribution, replication behavior, and overall platform performance.
• Troubleshoot complex Kafka incidents and participate in operational response for high-impact production issues.
• Work with Kafka brokers, producers, consumers, partition leadership, ISR behavior, and other core Kafka components.
• Support Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Kafka Streams, and related components within the event-streaming ecosystem.
• Contribute to event-driven architecture strategies and translate business throughput requirements into appropriate partitioning and replication approaches.
• Support Kafka deployments across Kubernetes and cloud environments.
• Use infrastructure automation and configuration management to improve platform consistency and operational efficiency.
• Integrate Kafka operations with DevOps and CI/CD practices.
• Implement monitoring, observability, reliability, and operational governance practices for production streaming platforms.
• Work with senior stakeholders to communicate platform strategy, technical risks, reliability considerations, and future Kafka requirements.
• Help define and execute a multi-year roadmap for Kafka and enterprise event-streaming capabilities.

Required Skills

Strong hands-on Apache Kafka administration experience in production is essential. Candidates should understand Kafka architecture and be comfortable operating large, distributed clusters rather than working only as application-level Kafka consumers.

The role requires knowledge of Kafka internals, including brokers, producers, consumers, partition leadership, ISR mechanics, ZooKeeper, KRaft, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and Kafka Streams. Practical experience with performance tuning and production incident response is particularly important.

Candidates should also understand distributed systems reliability engineering, high-availability design, replication strategies, capacity planning, monitoring, and troubleshooting. Experience working with large Kafka environments involving 10 or more brokers, 10,000 or more partitions, and TB-to-PB scale data retention is specifically relevant to this opportunity.

Preferred Skills

Experience with Confluent Platform and Kafka ecosystem technologies such as MirrorMaker 2, Cluster Linking, and Kafka Connect is preferred. Experience deploying and operating Kafka on production-grade Kubernetes environments is also valuable.

Cloud experience with AWS and/or Google Cloud Platform can strengthen the profile. Familiarity with Terraform or Ansible for infrastructure automation, GitHub or GitLab for source control and collaboration, JIRA for work management, and Argo CD for GitOps or continuous delivery workflows is useful.

Candidates with Python and shell scripting skills can contribute effectively to automation, operational tooling, diagnostics, and platform management.

Education

The job description does not specify a mandatory degree or particular academic discipline. Candidates should have a strong technical background relevant to distributed systems, middleware, platform engineering, software infrastructure, or related technology areas. Equivalent professional expertise should be demonstrated through substantial hands-on experience.

Experience

A minimum of 10 years of overall IT industry experience is required, particularly across distributed systems, middleware, or platform engineering. The position also requires 5 to 8 years of deep, hands-on Apache Kafka administration experience in production environments.

The expected background is senior and platform-focused. Candidates should have direct experience operating Kafka at scale, responding to production incidents, tuning performance, designing reliable clusters, and managing the operational lifecycle of enterprise event-streaming infrastructure.

Required Technologies

The core technology is Apache Kafka. Relevant Kafka ecosystem technologies include Confluent Platform, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Kafka Streams, MirrorMaker 2, Cluster Linking, ZooKeeper, and KRaft.

The infrastructure environment includes Kubernetes, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Terraform, Ansible, and cloud-native deployment practices. DevOps and collaboration technologies include GitHub, GitLab, JIRA, Argo CD, and CI/CD pipelines. Python and shell scripting are also relevant for automation and operational engineering.

Soft Skills

This position requires the ability to communicate complex Kafka and distributed-systems topics clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences. Strong analytical thinking is important when diagnosing production failures, evaluating performance bottlenecks, and selecting reliability improvements.

The successful candidate should be comfortable taking ownership of critical platforms, making technically sound decisions, collaborating with engineering teams, and presenting Kafka strategy to senior leadership. Business awareness is also important because platform architecture decisions need to reflect throughput, reliability, scalability, and operational requirements.

Benefits of Working in this Role

This senior role provides the opportunity to work on enterprise-scale event-streaming infrastructure and solve complex distributed-systems challenges. The position can offer valuable exposure to Kafka architecture, cloud platforms, Kubernetes, automation, observability, DevOps, and reliability engineering. It is particularly relevant for professionals seeking deeper platform ownership and strategic responsibility in large-scale data and streaming environments.

Work Mode

The job description does not explicitly specify onsite, hybrid, or remote work. The work location and shift information indicate an India-based role, with the listed working hours from 6:00 PM IST to 3:00 AM IST.

Location

The Atos job listing identifies Pune, Maharashtra, India as the publication location. The role description also lists Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai as role locations. Candidates should verify the applicable location during the application process.

Who Should Apply

This opportunity is best suited to senior technology professionals with 10 or more years of IT experience and substantial hands-on Apache Kafka administration experience. Candidates should have operated production Kafka platforms at significant scale and be comfortable with cluster architecture, performance tuning, reliability engineering, incident response, automation, and cloud or Kubernetes environments.

Professionals who have worked as Kafka platform owners, distributed-systems engineers, middleware specialists, platform engineers, or event-streaming administrators may find this role relevant. Candidates should be prepared to demonstrate practical experience rather than only theoretical Kafka knowledge.

Career Growth

The role can support progression toward senior platform architecture, enterprise event-streaming leadership, distributed-systems architecture, cloud platform engineering, and reliability engineering responsibilities. Experience gained across Kafka, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, automation, observability, and strategic platform planning can strengthen a long-term career in enterprise technology architecture and platform leadership.

Application Advice

Tailor your resume to demonstrate measurable experience operating Kafka in production. Highlight cluster sizes, broker counts, partition volumes, data-retention scale, throughput, latency improvements, availability work, incident response, migration projects, and automation initiatives where applicable.

Clearly mention hands-on experience with Kafka internals, KRaft or ZooKeeper, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Kafka Streams, Confluent Platform, MirrorMaker 2, Cluster Linking, Kubernetes, AWS or GCP, Terraform or Ansible, and CI/CD tooling. Be prepared to discuss how you would design replication and partitioning strategies, troubleshoot broker-level problems, improve reliability, and manage high-throughput event-streaming platforms.