“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 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.
This is not a
pure build 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:
- 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
