Azure SRE - Kafka | Confluence

A well-established financial services enterprise is looking for hands-on support across its streaming data platform. The business runs a modern Azure-based data and AI environment, with Confluent-managed Kafka sitting at the centre of how data moves across the organisation. The team is practical and collaborative, with a strong focus on keeping critical systems reliable while continuing to build out newer data and AI capability.

We're looking for an SRE-minded engineer to step into a contract role covering business-as-usual support for the Kafka/Confluent platform on Azure. This is a hands-on role sitting at the intersection of Data and AI — someone comfortable owning reliability, deployments and day-to-day platform health, not just watching dashboards.

You'll be picking up where a team member left off, so you'll need to move quickly: understanding the existing setup, taking ownership of support, and keeping things running smoothly from day one.

The Day-to-Day Expect to spend your time monitoring and maintaining the Confluent-on-Azure Kafka platform, troubleshooting data pipeline issues, and keeping an eye on system health and uptime. You'll be building and launching container images into Kubernetes (AKS), supporting deployments and rollouts as part of ongoing platform operations. Vulnerability management and patching will be part of the mix, alongside general data process support that feeds into the wider Data and AI team's work.

This is very much a BAU support seat — reliability, resilience and keeping the lights on come first, with plenty of hands-on technical work day to day.

Solid hands-on experience with Kafka and Confluent (topics, partitions, consumer groups, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect) Experience running Confluent/Kafka on Azure specifically Strong Kubernetes experience — building and deploying container images, ideally on AKS An SRE mindset — comfortable with monitoring, alerting, incident response and on-call support Exposure to vulnerability management and patching processes Enough data literacy to work effectively alongside a Data and AI team Ability to hit the ground running with minimal ramp-up time Immediate or short notice availability for a 3-month contract

Someone self-sufficient and reliability-focused, who can pick up an existing platform quickly and take ownership without a long handover. You'll be comfortable working independently in a BAU capacity, while still collaborating closely with the broader Data and AI team when needed.

On Offer A focused, well-scoped 3-month contract with a well-known New Zealand insurer, working on a modern Azure/Confluent/Kubernetes stack. Good rates for the right hands-on SRE/DevOps skillset.

If you know Kafka and Confluent inside out and are comfortable owning reliability on Azure, get in touch.