Assignment description

We are looking for an Integration Specialist / Platform Engineer to build, operate and continuously improve integration and platform capabilities used by multiple development teams.

In this role, you will focus on platform stability, automation and self-service, with end-to-end operational responsibility according to a “you build it – you run it” approach. The assignment is centered around Kafka cluster and HiveMQ administration, including automation of related management tasks to ensure reliable operation and scalability of the platforms.

While the role is not focused on daily application development, you may also participate in customer projects when needed.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy and maintain multi-cluster, multi-region Apache Kafka environments on Kubernetes, managed by Strimzi Operator or similar, as well as enterprise HiveMQ MQTT brokers.
• Drive the platform upgrade lifecycle for Kafka, Strimzi and HiveMQ, coordinating patching to mitigate CVEs with zero application downtime.
• Develop and maintain custom Kafka Connectors, Source/Sink, for seamless data movement between legacy systems and cloud.
• Define and implement scaling strategies, node affinity rules, topology spread constraints and persistent volume management for IOPS-intensive message workloads.
• Manage Kafka broker partition layouts, topic compaction, segment retention and cluster-wide resource allocation.
• Design high-availability and disaster recovery strategies, including cross-region replication and automated failover.
• Enforce data governance standards through Schema Registries, including Avro, Protobuf and JSON Schema.
• Architect edge traffic routing to messaging clusters using advanced ingress layers, complex routing policies and edge capabilities such as Envoy Gateway or custom proxies.
• Enforce data governance boundaries through Kafka ACLs, SASL authentication and API Manager integrations for authentication intercept handles, such as OAuth/OIDC validation paths.
• Implement end-to-end security frameworks, including mTLS validation, SSL verification, SASL/SCRAM and RBAC.
• Build and maintain observability pipelines using Prometheus and Grafana, including custom dashboards for critical broker KPIs.
• Define proactive alerting rules for cluster anomalies such as KubeNodeNotReady, JVM memory degradation, disk capacity thresholds and detached storage states.
• Perform Root Cause Analysis, RCA, for platform outages and implement automated guardrails to prevent recurrence.
• Provide Tier 3 support for complex integration issues, including consumer lag, rebalance loops and network bottlenecks.
• Act as technical SME for application engineering teams working in Java/Spring Boot, advising on Producer/Consumer settings such as acks, idempotency, batch sizing and schema management.
• Ensure platform stability, performance, scalability and cost efficiency.
• Architect and maintain reusable GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines to validate, lint and test infrastructure manifests, Kafka client configurations and custom plug-ins before deployment.
• Use automated scaling frameworks such as KEDA to dynamically scale application consumers based on real-time lag and throughput metrics.
• Treat infrastructure as code using Helm for packaging, resource templating and OCI artifact management.
• Provide clean abstractions, developer self-service tooling and documented READMEs to help teams provision topics, schemas and credentials safely within architectural guardrails.
• Handle incident, problem and change management at platform level.
• Collaborate with Security, Architecture and development teams.

Qualifications:

Platform & Cloud

• 4–6 years of experience with Apache Kafka, Strimzi, Kafka Connect API, Kraft.
• 4–6 years of experience working with Java and Spring Boot Framework
• Experience with PostgreSQL
• Strong experience with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
• Linux experience (including WSL)
• GitHub Actions and ArgoCD
• Knowledge of Splunk, Fluent Bit and Helm

DevOps & Automation

• CI/CD using GitHub Actions and/or Jenkins
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or equivalent)

Observability

• Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus
• Fluent Bit or OpenTelemetry

Streaming & Messaging

• Apache Kafka at platform level (clusters, performance, security)
• HiveMQ broker

Nice to Have

• Experience in APIM platforms
• Experience in Azure, AWS or Google cloud 
• Cloud cost optimization experience
• Experience of working at an Integration department in large enterprise environments

Personal Attributes

• Strong problem-solving skills
• Humble attitude
• Comfortable with operational responsibility
• Fluent in English (Swedish is an advantage)