Senior Kafka Platform Engineer

Key Responsibilities

• Platform Engineering is the backbone of Trade Republic’s engineering velocity. Our mission is to build scalable platforms for a Europe-scale bank — serving internal engineers, and building in-house control planes for managing the bank’s infrastructure
• We’re a ~50-person Platform team focused on one thing: enabling product engineers to move fast and operate autonomously by default
• We build self-service platforms, golden paths, and opinionated tooling so that over 400 engineers can ship with confidence
• From Kubernetes fleet management and CI/CD to an internal Developer Hub built on Backstage, our work underpins every trade, savings plan, and card payment that flows through the platform
• Kafka is becoming the central nervous system of Trade Republic — connecting trading, banking, financial crime detection, and more in real time
• Today, scaling our Kafka infrastructure to match the pace of the business means too much manual work, too much operational toil, and not enough time building the platform it could be
• We are changing that — treating Kafka clusters as fungible shards of a larger resource pool, with a Temporal-backed control plane, Backstage-integrated self-service, and transparent multi-cluster routing that gives product engineers a zero‑config experience
• Run Kafka at scale: Own the reliability and uptime of our Kafka fleet — design for high availability across domains and shards, engineer for resilience, and ensure near-zero downtime across maintenance, upgrades, and failure scenarios
• Build the streaming platform: Design and implement the control plane that makes the multi-cluster platform real — cluster lifecycle automation, topic and ACL provisioning, cross-shard replication, and the self-service interfaces that let product engineers onboard without understanding the infrastructure underneath
• Make streaming best practices the default: Define standards for how product engineers produce and consume — topic design, schema management, consumer group patterns, and reliability practices — and embed them into the platform so the right thing is always the easiest thing
• Own the platform end to end: Participate in the on-call rotation, ensuring full ownership of the systems you build and operate
• Own the direction: Shape the roadmap, drive cross-team initiatives, and align the streaming platform with broader engineering and business goals

Qualifications

• We are hiring from senior to staff level — whether you are a strong Kafka engineer ready to take on platform ownership, or you have already been leading streaming platform strategy across large engineering organisations, we’d love to hear from you
• Solid backend engineering background — Go is preferred but any strong language is welcome; familiarity with Kotlin/JVM is a plus as you’ll work directly with product teams who rely on it
• A track record of turning streaming best practices into opinionated standards that engineering teams actually adopt
• Deep, hands‑on Kafka expertise: you have run self‑hosted Kafka in production and have strong opinions on cluster architecture, scaling, replication, multi‑cluster design, performance tuning, and security
• 4+ years of experience in streaming, platform engineering, or a related systems discipline
• Cloud‑native in your DNA: hands‑on with Kubernetes and IaC tooling, running production workloads on AWS or equivalent
• Ability to drive cross‑team initiatives and clearly communicate architectural trade‑offs to both engineers and leadership
• The ability to work in a flexible hybrid setup, with 2‑3 days a week in the office