Senior Cloud Engineer (m/f/x) - Kafka

Our team builds and maintains the foundational infrastructure services used across the Dynatrace Platform.

We're looking for a Senior Cloud Engineer to join our Platform Infrastructure team with a focus on Kafka. You will be working with Kubernetes-native operators to deliver highly available, consistent and observable event streaming for our Kubernetes-based platform — at scale, across hundreds of Kafka clusters.

This role is perfect for someone who enjoys developer-side Kubernetes work, running Kafka with Strimzi, keeping large fleets of clusters consistent and up to date, and contributing to operator code when necessary.

Your Responsibilities

• Deploy, operate, and maintain Kafka on Kubernetes using Strimzi across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• Own the Kafka cluster lifecycle: version upgrades, scaling, partition rebalancing, and capacity planning.
• Manage topics, users, and ACLs declaratively and keep configuration consistent across the fleet — detecting and preventing configuration drift.
• Build pre-release checks and automated quality gates for Kafka changes to catch issues before they reach production.
• Contribute to and debug existing Golang-based operators (Operator Framework).
• Design and template Helm charts for Kafka and related platform services.
• Automate deployments using CI/CD and GitOps principles (ArgoCD).
• Collaborate with platform and product teams to provide reliable, scalable event streaming for Dynatrace products.
• Participate in troubleshooting and incident resolution for Kafka and related infrastructure services.
• Use AI-assisted developer tooling and AIOps to automate toil, speed up troubleshooting, and continuously improve how we build and operate our services.
• Continuously improve monitoring and observability for Kafka (broker health, consumer lag, under-replicated partitions).

Must Have:

• Proven hands-on experience operating Kafka in production (upgrades, scaling, troubleshooting).
• Solid understanding of Kafka internals and distributed-systems fundamentals (partitioning, replication, leader election, consumer groups, delivery guarantees).
• Developer-oriented Kubernetes knowledge (less cluster ops, more application/service integration).
• Scripting/programming expertise in Bash and Go (or another higher-level language).
• Helm proficiency – creating and templating charts.
• Familiarity with CI/CD and GitOps workflows (ArgoCD).
• Experience using AI-assisted developer tooling (e.g. coding assistants, AI-driven troubleshooting) in your daily engineering work.
• Experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP (at least one).
• Basic understanding of Kubernetes Operators principles (CRD, Reconciliation) and willingness to contribute to Golang based Operators.

Nice-to-have:

• Experience with Strimzi or another Kafka operator, and with Cruise Control for rebalancing.
• Terraform/OpenTofu experience (infrastructure currently partly managed this way — migrating towards more operators).
• Monitoring & observability experience for Kafka (e.g. Prometheus metrics, consumer lag alerting).
• Experience with any of our broader infrastructure stack: PostgreSQL, Vault, RabbitMQ, Redis, Istio, External Secrets Operator (ESO) or Kyverno. The role offers plenty of opportunity to grow into these services alongside the Kafka focus.

• Dynatrace is a leader in unified observability and security.
• We provide a culture of excellence with competitive compensation packages designed to recognize and reward performance.
• Our employees work with the largest cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud, and other leading partners worldwide to create strategic alliances.
• You'll get to work at the forefront of innovation with Dynatrace Intelligence—the industry's first agentic operations system. Bringing together deterministic and agentic AI, it helps teams understand what's happening, why it matters, and what to do next— automatically.
• Over 50% of the Fortune 100 companies are current customers of Dynatrace.

Due to legal reasons, we are obliged to list a salary range for this position, which is €74,000 – € 92,000 gross per year based on full-time employment (38.5 h/week). We’ve listed the salary range for transparency, but if your experience and skills bring unique value, we’d still love to hear from you - please apply even if you’re outside the range.

Dynatrace provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic. We actively foster an inclusive workplace that celebrates differences and promotes accessibility, collaboration, and growth for all.