Virtusa - Confluent Support Engineer

Description : We are seeking an experienced Confluent Support Engineer with strong expertise in Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform and prior experience in the banking domain. The ideal candidate will be responsible for supporting mission-critical real-time data streaming platforms, ensuring high availability, performance, security, and smooth incident resolution in a regulated financial environment.

Key Responsibilities :

- Provide L2/L3 production support for Confluent Kafka clusters and streaming platforms.

- Monitor, troubleshoot, and resolve incidents related to Kafka brokers, topics, partitions, producers, consumers, connectors, and schema registry.

- Handle 24x7 support / rotational shifts for production systems.

- Perform root cause analysis (RCA) for platform issues and implement preventive measures.

- Support Confluent components :

1. Kafka Brokers

2. Zookeeper / KRaft

3. Schema Registry

4. Kafka Connect

5. ksqlDB

6. Control Center

- Manage cluster upgrades, patching, capacity planning, and performance tuning.

- Implement monitoring using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, ELK, Dynatrace, etc.

- Ensure platform security using SSL/TLS, SASL, RBAC, ACLs.

- Support DR drills, failover testing, and resilience engineering.

- Work closely with application teams, DevOps, Infra, and database teams.

- Maintain operational runbooks, SOPs, and knowledge articles.

Required Skills :

Technical Skills :

- Strong hands-on experience in Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform (minimum 3+ years).

- Good understanding of distributed systems, event streaming architecture.

- Experience in Linux administration and shell scripting.

- Strong troubleshooting skills in performance, lag, throughput, broker failures.

- Knowledge of Kafka consumer groups, offsets, partition strategy.

- Experience with CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab, Azure DevOps).

- Familiarity with Kubernetes / OpenShift / Docker is preferred.

- Exposure to cloud platforms (AWS / Azure / GCP) is an advantage.

- Basic SQL / NoSQL database knowledge.

Banking Domain Skills :

- Experience supporting banking applications such as :

1. Payments

2. Core Banking

3. Treasury

4. Cards

5. AML / Fraud systems

6. Trade Finance

- Understanding of high availability, compliance, audit, and security controls in BFSI.

Soft Skills :

- Strong communication and stakeholder management.

- Ability to work under pressure in critical production environments.

- Analytical thinking and ownership mindset.

- Excellent documentation skills.