9X5 Consulting is seeking a highly skilled Kafka Engineer to help drive the evolution of our event-driven architecture and support our continued growth. We are looking for someone who thrives in complex distributed systems, has a deep understanding of streaming technologies and is passionate about building reliable, scalable data platforms. If you excel in fast-paced engineering environments, enjoy solving challenging technical problems and collaborate effectively across teams to deliver high-quality solutions, we want to hear from you
About 9X5 Consulting
We are transforming the way business and technology is managed by putting real-time data into the hands of every decision maker across organisations. The insight garnered from diverse backgrounds, perspectives and lived experiences results in pioneering innovations across the organisation and better experiences for our customers. The more diverse our talent, the more impact we have on each other and on our valued clients.
Our clients range from small SME's right through to some of the largest ASX listed organisations in Australia, so experience at selling to stakeholders at this level is required.
A bit about you
* You're an engineer who loves building scalable, event-driven systems and solving complex distributed-architecture challenges.
* You have hands-on experience with Kafka and enjoy designing reliable, high-throughput data pipelines.
* You're passionate about platform reliability and naturally think in terms of SLAs, SLOs, error budgets, and observability.
* You take ownership of incidents diving deep into root causes and turning learnings into better code and stronger systems.
* You enjoy working across teams, collaborating on integration patterns and helping others adopt best practices.
* You communicate clearly, share knowledge generously and are comfortable coordinating changes across multiple services.
* You're always looking ahead; proactively thinking about scale, future requirements and opportunities to improve the platform.
Key Responsibilities
* Design, build, and optimise scalable Kafka event streams that support diverse business and technical needs.
* Drive and standardise integration best practices, tooling and architectural patterns across all engineering teams.
* Champion reliability by establishing and supporting SLAs, SLOs, error budgets, observability frameworks and on-call processes.
* Lead deep investigations into production incidents, identify root causes and implement long-term fixes in code and process.
* Collaborate with teams to ensure seamless adoption of event-driven architecture and high-quality service integrations.
* Proactively identify opportunities to future-proof the platform and propose scalable, forward-thinking solutions.
* Communicate effectively with multiple stakeholders, sharing knowledge and coordinating platform-wide changes.
Job Requirements
* Strong experience designing, building and implementing scalable event streams that support diverse business and engineering needs.
* Hands-on expertise delivering production-grade solutions using Apache Kafka, including Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, kSQL DB and/or Apache Flink.
* Solid understanding of event-streaming patterns and the ability to determine when and how to apply them effectively.
* Experience integrating and working with a variety of database technologies for data extraction, updates and loading.
* Familiarity with Identity and Access Management protocols such as OAuth, OIDC, SAML and LDAP.
* Proficiency in tools and languages such as Terraform, Kustomize, Bash, JavaScript and Java for infrastructure automation and streaming application development.
* Experience performance-tuning Kafka components including Topics, Producers, Consumers, Connectors, kSQL DB and Flink pipelines.
* Strong understanding of networking protocols and standards such as TCP, HTTP/2 and WebSockets.
* Ability to investigate production incidents, identify root causes and contribute permanent fixes to code, architecture and processes.
* Valid working rights in Australia.
Bonus Experience
* Confluent certifications (Administrator or Developer).
* Experience with Confluent for Kubernetes.
* Development of custom Kafka Connectors or Kafka Streams applications.
* Knowledge of resilience patterns (load balancing, throttling, back-pressure, circuit breaking).
Personal attributes
* Amazing energy, optimism and a great work ethic.
* You have a sharp eye for accuracy and thoroughness in all aspects of your work.
* A reliability-first mindset, with a passion for building stable, observable and fault-tolerant systems.
* Strong communication skills, with the ability to clearly explain complex concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
* Highly collaborative, with a willingness to work across multiple teams to uplift standards, share knowledge and drive alignment.
* Proactive and forward-thinking — always looking for opportunities to improve scalability, performance and platform health.
* Analytical and detail-oriented, especially when investigating production incidents or identifying systemic issues.
* Self-driven and accountable, able to work independently while contributing effectively to shared goals.
* Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, evolving environment and adapting to new challenges as the platform grows.
* You consistently deliver high-quality work, demonstrating reliability and trustworthiness.
* Excellent presentation and negotiation skills.
Deal-breakers (stuff we don't want in a new team member)
* A "that'll do" approach to our clients' projects;
* A closed mind to change;
* Big egos. We're really, really not keen on big egos here.
Benefits, culture & values
9X5 Consulting prides itself on being a fantastic place to work and a place where our staff can develop their skills to become world leading consultants. More importantly, work as part of a team and provide modern, high quality digital solutions to our clients. Our company culture is fun, supportive, energetic and outcome-focussed.
Here at 9X5 Consulting, we put a lot of effort into delivering the best customer experience of any ICT provider in Australia. We work pretty hard, but that doesn't come without a little play. Our company culture is fun, supportive, energetic and outcome-focussed.
Other benefits of working with us:
* Training and development - We offer heaps of courses, certifications and coaching
* Mac or PC? You decide
* Cost Price Technology – 9X5 Consulting discounts
* Everyone has a very personalised career and learning plan. Our commitment is to help you to become the best you can be.
* Referral program
If you're passionate about managing and coordinating high-quality tender submissions to support business growth, join our dynamic team at 9X5 Consulting – your skills and attention to detail are exactly what we need
*Only applicants with citizenship, permanent visa and suitable work visa will be considered.
No agencies please