Senior Systems Engineer

Johannesburg or Cape Town, South Africa (Hybrid)

Leading Banking & Financial Services Environment

12-Month Contract

Intermediate to Senior Level

About the Opportunity

We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Systems Engineer - Kafka Platform Specialist to join a leading financial services organisation. This is an exciting opportunity for a platform engineering professional who is passionate about building, automating, and supporting enterprise-scale event streaming solutions.

You will take ownership of the Kafka platform, ensuring its reliability, security, scalability, and operational excellence while working closely with development, infrastructure, and cloud teams.

Key Responsibilities

As the Kafka Platform Specialist, you will:

• Manage and support production Kafka environments, including monitoring, troubleshooting, incident response, and performance optimisation.
• Plan and execute platform upgrades, patching, and lifecycle management activities.
• Design and implement scalable, resilient, and secure Kafka architectures.
• Drive infrastructure automation and operational efficiencies using DevOps and Infrastructure-as-Code methodologies.
• Collaborate with application and engineering teams to onboard new workloads and enhance platform standards.
• Ensure platform security through the implementation of best practices, governance, and access controls.
• Build and maintain monitoring, alerting, and observability solutions to improve platform health and performance.

Requirements

Essential Experience

• 6+ years' experience in Systems Engineering, Platform Engineering, or Infrastructure Engineering.
• 4+ years of hands-on Kafka administration experience.
• Experience with Confluent Platform and/or Confluent Cloud.
• Strong Linux administration and troubleshooting skills.
• Proven experience supporting mission-critical production environments.

Technical Skills

• Apache Kafka
• Confluent Platform / Confluent Cloud
• Python and/or Bash scripting
• CI/CD pipelines
• Terraform and/or Ansible
• Linux Administration
• Azure Cloud Services
• Kafka Security (TLS/SSL, SASL, ACLs)
• Monitoring & Observability Tools including Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Splunk, and Azure Monitor

What We're Looking For

The ideal candidate will be:

• Passionate about platform engineering and automation.
• A proactive problem-solver with strong troubleshooting skills.
• Comfortable working in complex enterprise environments.
• Able to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams.
• Focused on reliability, scalability, and continuous improvement.

Why Apply?

Work within a leading enterprise banking environment

Exposure to large-scale event streaming platforms

Hybrid working model

High-impact engineering role

Opportunity to work with modern cloud and automation technologies

Ready to Apply?

If you're an experienced Kafka specialist looking for your next challenge, we'd love to hear from you.

Apply today with your latest CV and take the next step in your platform engineering career.