Job Description

“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:
• Python
• Shell / Bash
• 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