TRCI-26-05405

Kafka Platform Engineer (AKS/Strimzi/HiveMQ)

Contract role in Stockholm for a Kafka Platform Engineer responsible for building, operating, and continuously improving enterprise messaging/integration platforms used by multiple teams. The focus is on running multi-cluster/multi-region Kafka on Kubernetes (AKS) with Strimzi, administering HiveMQ, automating platform operations, upgrades and CVE patching with zero downtime, and providing Tier 3 support and RCA. The engineer will implement security (ACLs, SASL/SCRAM, mTLS, RBAC, OAuth/OIDC paths), observability (Prometheus/Grafana/Splunk), GitOps/CI/CD (ArgoCD, GitHub Actions), IaC (Terraform), and advise Java/Spring Boot teams on Kafka producer/consumer best practices and Kafka Connect integrations.

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Position summary

Location: Sweden
Workplace: Hybrid
Employment: Contract
Experience: Minimum 5 years and Maximum 10 years

Apply now

Role overview

Why This Role Matters.

Your Impact

Deliver Enterprise Value

Help organisations solve complex business problems through modern technology, consulting expertise and measurable outcomes.

Collaboration

Work Across Teams

Collaborate with consultants, architects, engineers and client stakeholders throughout the project lifecycle.

Growth

Learn Continuously

Gain exposure to enterprise technologies, certifications, mentoring and real-world project experience.

Career Path

Grow With Ubique

Build a long-term consulting career with opportunities to take on greater responsibility and leadership over time.

Responsibilities

What You'll Be Doing.

Every role at Ubique contributes directly to solving meaningful business challenges for our clients.

As a Kafka platform Engineer within ICC, you are responsible for building, operating, and continuously improving integration and platform capabilities that are used by multiple development teams.

Design, deploy, and maintain multi-cluster, multi-region Apache Kafka environments managed by the Strimzi Operator or similar on Kubernetes, as well as enterprise HiveMQ MQTT brokers.

Drive the platform upgrade lifecycle (minor and major versions) for Kafka, Strimzi, and HiveMQ, coordinating platform patching cadences seamlessly to mitigate CVEs with zero application downtime.

Develop and maintain custom Kafka Connectors (Source/Sink) for seamless data movement between legacy systems and the cloud.

Formulate and implement scaling strategies, node affinity rules, topology spread constraints, and persistent volume management optimized for IOPS-intensive message workloads.

Manage Kafka broker partition layouts, topic compaction configurations, segment retention behaviors, and cluster-wide resource allocation.

Enforce data governance standards through the management of Schema Registries (Avro, Protobuf, JSON Schema).

Architect edge traffic routing to messaging clusters using advanced ingress layers, translating complex routing policies and managing edge capabilities like Envoy Gateway or custom proxies.

Enforce data governance boundaries by implementing Kafka ACLs, SASL authentication structures, and integrating API Managers for authentication intercept handles (e.g., managing OAuth/OIDC validation paths)

Build and maintain deep observability pipelines using Prometheus and Grafana, configuring custom dashboards to monitor critical broker KPIs

Formulate proactive alerting rules to catch cluster anomalies—such as KubeNodeNotReady, JVM memory degradation, disk capacity thresholds, or storage detached states—before they impact production workloads.

Perform Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for platform outages and implement automated guardrails to prevent recurrence.

Technology stack

Tools & Technologies.

The platforms and technologies you'll use to build modern, enterprise-grade solutions.

Apache Kafka

Required

Strimzi

Required

Kafka Connect

Required

KRaft

Required

Kubernetes

Required

AKS

Required

Azure Kubernetes Service

Required

HiveMQ

Required

MQTT

Required

Java

Required

Spring Boot

Required

PostgreSQL

Required

Schema Registry

Required

Avro

Required

Protobuf

Required

JSON Schema

Required

ACL

Required

SASL

Required

SCRAM

Required

mTLS

Required

Requirements

Skills & Experience.

We value curiosity, collaboration and continuous learning. If you don't meet every requirement but believe you can make an impact, we'd still love to hear from you.

Essential

Required Qualifications

Apache Kafka (platform operations: clusters, performance, security)

Strimzi Operator (or similar) on Kubernetes

Kafka Connect API; building/maintaining Source/Sink connectors

KRaft (Kafka without ZooKeeper)

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Kubernetes operations (multi-cluster/multi-region, scheduling/affinity, storage/PVs)

HiveMQ (enterprise MQTT broker) administration

Java

Spring Boot

Linux

GitHub Actions

ArgoCD

CI/CD (GitHub Actions and/or Jenkins)

Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or equivalent)

Helm

Observability: Prometheus and Grafana

Splunk

Fluent Bit and/or OpenTelemetry

PostgreSQL

Kafka security: ACLs, SASL/SCRAM, SSL/mTLS, RBAC

Preferred

Nice to Have

API Management (APIM) platforms

Public cloud experience beyond AKS (Azure/AWS/Google Cloud)

Cloud cost optimization

Experience in large enterprise integration departments/environments

Swedish language

What you'll gain

More Than Just A Job.

We're committed to helping every team member grow professionally, personally and technically while working on meaningful projects.

Global Exposure

Collaborate with international clients and multicultural teams on enterprise programmes.

Continuous Learning

Expand your expertise through mentoring, certifications and hands-on project experience.

Career Growth

Take ownership, develop leadership skills and grow your consulting career over time.

Flexible Working

Hybrid and remote collaboration designed around trust and delivering exceptional outcomes.

People First

Join a supportive culture where collaboration, respect and long-term relationships come first.

Enterprise Projects

Work on meaningful technology initiatives for leading organisations across industries.

Apply

Apply for Kafka Platform Engineer (AKS/Strimzi/HiveMQ)

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