Senior Kafka Engineer, Enterprise Data Engineering
We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Senior Infrastructure Engineer to join our Enterprise Data Engineering team. This full-time role is ideal for candidates with hands-on experience in infrastructure technologies, Apache Kafka including Confluent Kafka and Kafka Streams, MQ, SQL and NoSQL databases, and cloud engineering. If you are passionate about building efficient, scalable platforms, we would love to hear from you.
Locations & Work Arrangement
: Candidates must be willing to commute to one of the following hub locations with a hybrid schedule of four days onsite and one day remote per week with flexibility:
Phoenix, AZ
Johnston, RI – One Citizens Bank Way
Westwood, MA – 200 Station Drive
Iselin, NJ
Plano, TX
Key Responsibilities
• Lead a team of engineers and technicians in monitoring, diagnosing, and resolving infrastructure issues using event-based management
• Administer and troubleshoot Kafka clusters, including configuration and performance tuning
• Integrate Kafka with various systems using connectors such as MQ, MongoDB, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL
• Automate infrastructure setup across environments using Terraform
• Provide senior-level support and troubleshooting across a wide range of technologies
• Collaborate within agile teams to drive modern development practices and product vision
• Serve as the primary point of contact for daily operations and incident management
• Conduct proactive monitoring to identify and mitigate potential service disruptions
• Document actions, create reports, and establish escalation procedures
• Audit support tickets to identify patterns and reduce downtime
• Ensure compliance with internal policies and industry standards
• Develop and maintain runbooks and playbooks for operational excellence
Required Qualifications
• 7 or more years of experience in Kafka administration on-prem and cloud, messaging systems, and database integration
• Proficiency with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, event-driven architecture, DevOps, and containerization
• Experience deploying Kafka clients and brokers in production and disaster recovery environments
• Proven ability to scale Kafka clusters and connector infrastructure
• Hands-on experience building real-time data pipelines using Kafka producers and Spark Streaming consumers
• Familiarity with monitoring tools such as Splunk, Datadog, and Grafana
• Strong knowledge of source control systems such as SVN and Git
• Solid understanding of networking protocols, operating systems, and diagnostic tools
• Proficiency in scripting languages such as PowerShell, Bash, Python, and Perl
• Strong analytical and decision-making skills, even with limited information
• Ability to work independently and track issues to identify trends
• Excellent communication and customer service skills
• Sound judgment and autonomy in handling both emergency and routine situations
• Experience collaborating with technical teams for issue resolution
Desired Qualifications
• Experience with monitoring tools
• Working experience in the financial services industry
Education and Certifications
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electronics Engineering
Work Schedule
: Monday through Friday
Hybrid
: 4 days on site and 1 day remote
Pay Transparency
The salary range for this position is $125,000-155,000 per year, plus an opportunity to earn an annual discretionary bonus. Actual pay is based on various factors including but not limited to the work location, and relevant skills and experience.
We offer competitive pay, comprehensive medical, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits, maternity/paternity leave, flexible work arrangements, education reimbursement, wellness programs and more. Note, Citizens’ paid time off policy exceeds the mandatory, paid sick or paid time-away policy of very local and state jurisdiction in the United States. For an overview of our benefits, visit
https://jobs.citizensbank.com/benefits
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