Senior Cloud Engineer (m/f/x) - Kafka

Your role at Dynatrace

Our team builds and maintains the foundational infrastructure services used across the Dynatrace Platform.

We're looking for a Senior Cloud Engineer to join our Platform Infrastructure team with a focus on Kafka. You will be working with Kubernetes-native operators to deliver highly available, consistent and observable event streaming for our Kubernetes-based platform — at scale, across hundreds of Kafka clusters.

This role is perfect for someone who enjoys developer-side Kubernetes work, running Kafka with Strimzi, keeping large fleets of clusters consistent and up to date, and contributing to operator code when necessary.

Your Responsibilities

• Deploy, operate, and maintain Kafka on Kubernetes using Strimzi across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

• Own the Kafka cluster lifecycle: version upgrades, scaling, partition rebalancing, and capacity planning.

• Manage topics, users, and ACLs declaratively and keep configuration consistent across the fleet — detecting and preventing configuration drift.

• Build pre-release checks and automated quality gates for Kafka changes to catch issues before they reach production.

• Contribute to and debug existing Golang-based operators (Operator Framework).

• Design and template Helm charts for Kafka and related platform services.

• Automate deployments using CI/CD and GitOps principles (ArgoCD).

• Collaborate with platform and product teams to provide reliable, scalable event streaming for Dynatrace products.

• Participate in troubleshooting and incident resolution for Kafka and related infrastructure services.

• Use AI-assisted developer tooling and AIOps to automate toil, speed up troubleshooting, and continuously improve how we build and operate our services.

• Continuously improve monitoring and observability for Kafka (broker health, consumer lag, under-replicated partitions).

What will help you succeedMust Have:

• Proven hands-on experience operating Kafka in production (upgrades, scaling, troubleshooting).

• Solid understanding of Kafka internals and distributed-systems fundamentals (partitioning, replication, leader election, consumer groups, delivery guarantees).

• Developer-oriented Kubernetes knowledge (less cluster ops, more application/service integration).

• Scripting/programming expertise in Bash and Go (or another higher-level language).

• Helm proficiency – creating and templating charts.

• Familiarity with CI/CD and GitOps workflows (ArgoCD).