Senior Kafka Engineer

About Justera Group Justera Group AB is a leading Swedish IT consulting firm with great experience specializing in building high-performing technology teams and delivering end-to-end IT solutions. Led by dynamic female executives, Justera Group focuses on helping businesses harness the power of digital technologies to continuously evolve in today’s rapidly changing economy. The company has deep expertise in IT consultancy, software development, and recruitment services, providing clients with purpose-driven, well-trained consultants who consistently deliver efficient and effective results. Justera Group manages the entire talent lifecycle, from hiring to ongoing management, ensuring the right fit for each project on time and within budget. With their strong commitment to quality, collaboration, and client success, Justera Group is a trusted partner for technology innovation across Sweden. About the Role: We are looking for a Senior Kafka Engineer to join an integration and platform engineering team responsible for building, operating, and continuously improving critical integration and messaging capabilities used by multiple development teams. The role focuses on Apache Kafka, HiveMQ, Kubernetes, platform stability, automation, self-service, security, and end-to-end operational ownership. You will be responsible for designing and maintaining highly available messaging platforms, automating operational processes, improving observability, and ensuring reliable and scalable platform performance. The position is primarily platform-focused rather than application-development focused, although you will collaborate closely with development teams and may contribute to customer projects when required. Key Responsibilities: Design, deploy, operate, and maintain multi-cluster and multi-region Apache Kafka environments running on Kubernetes, using Strimzi Operator or similar technologies. Administer and maintain enterprise HiveMQ MQTT broker environments. Drive the upgrade lifecycle for Kafka, Strimzi, and HiveMQ, including minor and major version upgrades and security patching. Coordinate platform patching activities to mitigate vulnerabilities while maintaining application availability. Develop and maintain custom Kafka Connect Source and Sink connectors for data integration between legacy systems and cloud environments. Define and implement Kafka scaling strategies, node affinity, topology spread constraints, and persistent volume configurations for I/O-intensive workloads. Manage Kafka broker partition layouts, topic configurations, compaction, retention, segmentation, and cluster-wide resource allocation. Design and implement high-availability and disaster-recovery solutions, including cross-region replication and automated failover. Manage and enforce data governance using Schema Registry , including Avro, Protobuf, and JSON Schema. Design messaging traffic routing through ingress and edge technologies such as Envoy…