Staff Engineer, Cloud Platform (Kafka)

This position is based in Bangalore, India. The Cloud Platform Engineering team at Calix are responsible for the Platforms, Tools, and CI/CD pipelines at Calix. Our mission is to enable Calix engineers to accelerate the delivery of world-class products while ensuring the high availability, reliability, security, and performance expected by our customers. We are seeking Cloud Platform Engineers with proven expertise in the design and building of large-scale Cloud Infrastructure Platforms and managing the Kafka Infrastructure to join our team and help us deliver the foundation on which Calix products can thrive. You will help us achieve our mission through innovative solutions. Responsibilities: Design, build, and maintain a scalable and reliable Kafka solution using KRaft, Strimzi, Zookeeper, etc. Implement integration with KRaft and Strimzi for coordination and leader election. Automate the entire lifecycle of platform components from provisioning through decommissioning. You’ll help solve problems related to building a global Kafka architecture considering scalability, replication, schema registries and self-service IaC workflows to solve for different use cases such as high traffic telemetry (logs & metrics), business critical events and data processing.  Ensure Observability is an integral part of the infrastructure platforms and provides adequate visibility about their health, utilization, and cost. Build Cloud native CI/CD pipelines, tools and automation that enables developer autonomy and improves their productivity. Build tools that predict saturations/failures and take preventive actions through automation. Collaborate extensively with cross functional teams to understand their requirements; educate them through documentation/training and improve the adoption of the platforms/tools. Provide technical leadership for your peers and help them deliver the best solutions to the rest of Calix. As an expert in your area, you will help set the tone for how your team operates. You’ll emphasize modern, rigorous software development practices that emphasize testability, repeatability, and self-service automation. You’ll conduct code reviews and mentor more junior developers. You’ll openly collaborate with other teams’ leads and help raise the bar of engineering excellence across the entire organization.  Requirements: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field; or equivalent work experience. 10+ years of experience in building large scale distributed systems in an always available production environment. 5+ years of experience in building Infrastructure Platforms and CI/CD pipelines in a major public cloud provider – GCP preferred. Strong hands on designing integration solutions using Kafka and aware of integration best practices for data streaming solutions. Strong skills in In-memory applications, Data Integration. Strong awareness of Kafka ecosystem, KRaft, Strimzi, Zookeeper, Kafka cluster, Kafka broker, producer, consumer, Connectors, different APIs, Kafka Topic etc. Strong hands on SQL connector, HTTP connector etc. Strong knowledge on different APIs exposed by Kafka to handle the integration, data steaming and for data management. Strong awareness on designing deployment architecture for Kafka solutions. Solid hands on Kafka deployment and configuration. Experience on production deployment, invoke Kafka components as background processes, configuration, trouble shooting and environment maintenance. In-depth knowledge of Kubernetes and its ecosystem – Containerd/Docker, Helm/Plulumi, ServiceMesh, Terraform/Terragrunt, Ansible, ArgoCD/Workflow, Tekton, etc. Hand-on experience with observability platforms/tools like ELK/Fluentd/Fluenbit, Grafana/Prometheus/OpenTelemetry, Cortex/InfluxDB etc. Experience in Python, Golang or a similar language. Proven experience in leading major initiatives from requirements, design, and implementation to ongoing lifecycle management. Experience in coaching and mentoring junior engineers; strong verbal and written communications. Excellent problem-solving skills, with the ability to troubleshoot complex issues and implement effective solutions. Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively in a cross-functional team environment. Location: India – (Flexible hybrid work model - work from Bangalore office for 20 days in a quarter)