Infrastructure Data Engineer (Kafka) - Outside IR35 - Remote

Infrastructure Data Engineer - Kafka Focus
Fully Remote | Outside IR35
Working pattern: Sunday to Thursday
Supporting a team based in Israel

Exalto Consulting is supporting a client looking to appoint an experienced Infrastructure Data Engineer with strong Apache Kafka expertise.

This is a fully remote contract role for someone who has hands-on experience running and improving Kafka in live production environments. The focus is not on initial setup alone. It is on keeping a high-volume streaming platform reliable, scalable, and well tuned over time.

You would be joining a team responsible for maintaining and developing core data infrastructure that supports a range of business-critical use cases. The work includes improving platform performance, strengthening reliability, and helping internal teams make effective use of streaming capabilities.

What the role involves
You will take ownership of the day-to-day operation and improvement of Kafka infrastructure in production. That includes identifying performance issues, tuning configurations, resolving incidents, and building out the surrounding platform components needed to support a dependable streaming environment.

The role also involves close collaboration with engineering, data, and analytics teams, so it is important that you are comfortable working across functions and helping others use the platform effectively.

Key responsibilities
Operate, maintain, and optimise Kafka clusters in production environments
Design and improve Kafka infrastructure to support a range of streaming use cases.

Tune Kafka settings including partitions, replication, retention, and throughput
Monitor platform performance and address bottlenecks, instability, and capacity issues.

Build and support related components including Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and ELK.

Develop internal tooling and microservices to support self-service platform use
Improve monitoring, alerting, and observability using Prometheus and Grafana.

Investigate production incidents, carry out root cause analysis, and make preventative improvements.

Work with engineering, data, and analytics teams to ensure reliable data delivery.

What we are looking for
Proven experience running Kafka in live production environments.

Strong understanding of Kafka internals and the trade-offs involved in scaling and performance tuning.

Experience with Kafka Connect and Schema Registry.

Good Scripting and automation skills, ideally using Python.

Experience with Elasticsearch and Kibana.

Strong knowledge of Linux environments, Shell Scripting, and system performance tuning.

Experience with Docker and Kubernetes, or similar container and orchestration tooling.

Experience with CI/CD, Git, and infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform or Ansible.

A solid understanding of distributed systems and streaming architectures.

Experience supporting platforms where availability, resilience, and scale are important.

Desirable experience
Exposure to stream processing tools such as Apache Flink.

Experience with cloud platforms including AWS, Azure, or GCP.

Knowledge of hybrid environments.

Experience with RBAC, multi-tenant systems, or usage metering.

Experience with MSSQL or other relational databases.

Working arrangement
This role is fully remote and sits outside IR35.

The team is based in Israel, so the working pattern is Sunday to Thursday.

There is a two-hour time difference from the UK, and candidates should be comfortable working in line with that team structure.

Important note
This role requires genuine hands-on experience operating and optimising Kafka in production. Candidates whose experience is mainly limited to implementation, provisioning, or setup without ongoing production ownership are unlikely to be the right fit.

To find out more, please get in touch with Exalto Consulting with a copy of your latest CV.