“Otic” means smart people doing smart work, together. We are a proudly Australian-owned technology consultancy helping organisations design and build intelligent, scalable software solutions that unlock real business value. At Otic Group, you’ll work alongside highly capable engineers on complex, high-impact platforms across Data & Analytics, Cloud, Integration, and Cybersecurity . We partner with some of Australia’s most recognised organisations, delivering modern, event-driven and API-led architectures. We are currently looking for a Platform / Support Engineer specialising in Kafka (Confluent) and Kong API Gateway technologies to support, operate, and continuously improve critical integration platforms. About the Role As a Kafka / Kong Platform Engineer , your primary focus will be the ongoing support, reliability, and optimisation of event streaming and API gateway platforms in production environments. As a build/support role — you will be responsible for ensuring platforms are: Highly available Secure Observable Performant Operationally mature You will work across: Event-driven architecture (Kafka / Confluent) API management and gateway operations (Kong) Cloud-native platform engineering (Kubernetes, GCP/AWS/Azure) Incident management, troubleshooting, and continuous improvement Key Responsibilities Provide day-to-day operational support for Kafka / Confluent and Kong platforms Monitor platform health, performance, and availability, responding to incidents and alerts Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues across distributed systems Implement and maintain observability, alerting, and logging frameworks Manage and optimise: Kafka clusters, topics, partitions, and consumer groups Kong services, routes, plugins, and policies Ensure platform security and compliance , including OAuth2, mTLS, RBAC, and secrets management Perform capacity planning, scaling, and performance tuning Automate operational tasks using Terraform, scripting, and CI/CD pipelines Support platform upgrades, patching, and lifecycle management Work closely with client teams to provide technical support and guidance Contribute to runbooks, operational standards, and platform documentation Core Technical Skills Kafka / Confluent Strong experience with: Kafka Broker architecture and internals Consumer groups and partitioning strategies Schema Registry Kafka Connect Hands-on experience with: Confluent Platform and/or Confluent Cloud Experience supporting production Kafka environments Stream Processing Experience with: Kafka Streams (KStreams), Flink (or similar frameworks such as Spark Streaming or Dataflow) API Gateway (Kong) Experience operating and supporting Kong API Gateway Plugin configuration and customisation (Lua preferred) API security, rate limiting, and traffic management CI/CD integration for gateway deployments Cloud & Kubernetes Kubernetes (GKE, EKS, AKS or vanilla k8s) Helm, Kustomize, operators Cloud platforms: GCP, AWS or Azure Experience running production workloads in Kubernetes Security IAM and access control models Secrets management (e.g. Secret Manager, Vault) TLS, mTLS, certificate management OAuth 2.0 (client credentials flow) RBAC / ACL models Engineering & DevOps Infrastructure as Code: Terraform CI/CD: GitLab CI (or GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD, Harness) Containerisation: Docker Observability: New Relic, Sumo Logic (or Splunk, Datadog, AppDynamics) Code & infrastructure security tools: Snyk, SonarQube, Trivy, Nexus Programming & Scripting Strong scripting ability in: Python Shell / Bash Experience debugging JVM-based applications (Java) Kong plugin exposure using Lua (desirable) What Sets You Apart Proven experience supporting mission-critical platforms in production Strong troubleshooting skills across distributed, event-driven systems Experience in incident response and root cause analysis Ability to balance stability, performance, and delivery Consulting mindset with strong stakeholder engagement skills About You 5 years experience in platform, integration, or backend engineering Strong communicator who can engage both technical and business stakeholders Comfortable working in support-focused, operational environments Proactive, calm under pressure, and solution-oriented Why Otic Group? Work with top-tier Australian organisations Join a high-calibre, low-ego engineering culture Exposure to modern cloud-native and event-driven platforms Opportunity to shape platform reliability and operational excellence Melbourne-based, collaborative team environment Eligibility Must be based in Melbourne Must hold Australian Citizenship, Permanent Residency , or full work rights No visa sponsorship available at this time
