Senior Kafka Platform Engineer

Kafka is becoming the central nervous system of Trade Republic — connecting trading, banking, financial crime detection, and more in real time. We are treating Kafka clusters as fungible shards of a larger resource pool, with a Temporal-backed control plane, Backstage-integrated self-service, and transparent multi-cluster routing that gives product engineers a zero-config experience.

What you'll do

• Run Kafka at scale: Own the reliability and uptime of our Kafka fleet — design for high availability across domains and shards, engineer for resilience, and ensure near-zero downtime across maintenance, upgrades, and failure scenarios.
• Build the streaming platform: Design and implement the control plane that makes the multi-cluster platform real — cluster lifecycle automation, topic and ACL provisioning, cross-shard replication, and the self-service interfaces that let product engineers onboard without understanding the infrastructure underneath.
• Make streaming best practices the default: Define standards for how product engineers produce and consume — topic design, schema management, consumer group patterns, and reliability practices — and embed them into the platform so the right thing is always the easiest thing.
• Own the platform end to end: Participate in the on-call rotation, ensuring full ownership of the systems you build and operate.
• Own the direction: Shape the roadmap, drive cross-team initiatives, and align the streaming platform with broader engineering and business goals.

What you'll need

• 4+ years of experience in streaming, platform engineering, or a related systems discipline.
• We are hiring from senior to staff level — whether you are a strong Kafka engineer ready to take on platform ownership, or you have already been leading streaming platform strategy across large engineering organisations, we'd love to hear from you.
• Deep, hands-on Kafka expertise: you have run self-hosted Kafka in production and have strong opinions on cluster architecture, scaling, replication, multi-cluster design, performance tuning, and security.
• Solid backend engineering background — Go is preferred but any strong language is welcome; familiarity with Kotlin/JVM is a plus as you'll work directly with product teams who rely on it.
• A track record of turning streaming best practices into opinionated standards that engineering teams actually adopt.
• Cloud-native in your DNA: hands-on with Kubernetes and IaC tooling, running production workloads on AWS or equivalent.
• Ability to drive cross-team initiatives and clearly communicate architectural trade-offs to both engineers and leadership.
• The ability to work in a flexible hybrid setup, with 2-3 days a week in the office.