“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:
- 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
