Middleware Operations Engineer (Kafka/RabbitMQ)

Role Overview

We are looking for a hands-on Middleware Operations Engineer to operate and support our messaging, logging and infrastructure platforms.

The role will focus primarily on Apache Kafka and RabbitMQ, together with Linux, virtual machines and observability platforms such as ELK/Elastic Stack, Loki and Grafana.

You do not need to be an expert in every technology listed. Candidates with strong production experience in either Kafka or RabbitMQ, together with good Linux and troubleshooting skills, are encouraged to apply.

Key Responsibilities

• Operate and maintain middleware platforms, including Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ and related services.
• Monitor platform availability, performance, capacity and resource utilisation.
• Troubleshoot messaging issues such as consumer lag, message backlog, delivery failures, queue growth, connectivity problems and broker or node failures.
• Support the deployment, configuration, patching, scaling and upgrading of middleware components.
• Support logging and observability platforms such as ELK/Elastic Stack, Loki and Grafana.
• Investigate issues involving log ingestion, indexing, retention, storage utilisation, dashboards and alerts.
• Monitor and support Linux servers and virtual machines hosting middleware services.
• Respond to production incidents, identify root causes and implement corrective and preventive actions.
• Work with application, development and infrastructure teams to resolve integration and platform-related issues.
• Develop scripts, health checks and operational tools to automate routine activities and improve platform reliability.
• Perform routine platform administration, including configuration management, access control, certificate maintenance, monitoring and backup of relevant configurations.
• Maintain operational documentation, troubleshooting guides, runbooks and standard operating procedures.
• Contribute to capacity planning, high-availability arrangements, disaster recovery planning and platform-improvement initiatives.
• Participate in scheduled on-call and incident-response support when required.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• At least three years of experience in middleware operations, platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, production support or a related technical role.
• Strong hands-on experience administering and troubleshooting at least one production messaging platform, preferably Apache Kafka or RabbitMQ.
• Good understanding of messaging concepts such as producers, consumers, topics, partitions, queues, exchanges, routing, acknowledgements, offsets, retention and replication.
• Experience troubleshooting production issues such as message backlog, consumer lag, connectivity problems, service failures and resource bottlenecks.
• Strong Linux administration and troubleshooting skills, including service management, log analysis, system monitoring, networking fundamentals and resource utilisation.
• Experience supporting virtual machines or cloud-compute environments.
• Working knowledge of logging, monitoring or observability platforms such as ELK/Elastic Stack, Loki, Grafana or similar tools.
• Experience with production monitoring, alerting, incident response and root-cause analysis.
• Experience using Shell, Python or another relevant scripting language to automate operational tasks.
• Ability to independently investigate technical issues and implement practical and sustainable solutions.
• Good communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work across application, development and infrastructure teams.
• Willingness to participate in scheduled on-call support.

Added Advantages

• Experience supporting both Apache Kafka and RabbitMQ.
• Experience managing Kafka brokers, partitions, replication, consumer lag, cluster expansion or version upgrades.
• Experience with RabbitMQ clustering, exchanges, bindings, queue policies, dead-letter queues and failure recovery.
• Experience administering Elasticsearch, including index management, shard allocation, lifecycle policies, ingestion and storage capacity.
• Experience with Logstash, Vector, Beats, Fluent Bit, Fluentd or similar log-processing tools.
• Experience creating monitoring dashboards, alerting rules and platform health checks.
• Experience supporting Linux workloads on AWS EC2 or another cloud platform.
• Familiarity with Terraform, Ansible or similar Infrastructure as Code and configuration-management tools.
• Exposure to Docker or Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with middleware security practices, including ACLs, TLS and certificate management.
• Experience supporting platform migrations, capacity expansions or low-downtime maintenance activities.
• Relevant Kafka, RabbitMQ, Elastic, Linux or cloud certifications.