Job Description & Details
This is a heavy-hitting infrastructure role combining enterprise-grade Confluent Kafka architecture with cutting-edge AI agent development. You will be sitting in the Austin office four days a week, steering both traditional on-prem and cloud messaging backbones while weaving automated AI workflows into the SDLC.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
Your day-to-day will be a split personality of hard-core event streaming and AI automation. You'll spend mornings designing secure Kafka topologies—handling ACLs, encryption, and multi-region disaster recovery—and your afternoons architecting multi-agent workflows using GitHub Copilot and custom skills to automate infrastructure ops. When production breaks, you'll be the escalation point leading root cause analysis, and when development teams need guidance, you'll act as the principal advisor for data serialization and integration patterns.
The Core Tech Stack
You absolutely need deep, battle-tested experience with the Confluent Kafka Platform spanning both bare-metal on-prem and major cloud environments. Mastery over serialization standards like Avro and Protobuf is non-negotiable. Beyond streaming, you need heavy Python and Ansible scripting capabilities paired with modern DevOps toolchains like Azure, Jenkins, and Puppet. Finally, you must have legitimate, hands-on experience building AI-driven agents and leveraging GitHub Copilot for complex workflow automation.
Interview Expectations
Expect the interview panel to throw a complex distributed systems failure at you, asking how you would diagnose a cascading Kafka broker outage while maintaining data replication guarantees. They will also drill down into your AI experience, likely asking you to whiteboard a multi-agent orchestration pattern designed to automate an existing manual CI/CD pipeline bottleneck. The hiring manager is looking for someone who doesn't just talk about generative AI, but has actually implemented agentic workflows to solve real operational pain.
Application Advice
To get past the ATS, make sure your resume explicitly mirrors the exact phrasing found in the requirements, particularly terms like 'Confluent Kafka Platform', 'on-prem and cloud', 'agentic workflows', and 'GitHub Copilot'. Don't just list tools; describe specific instances where you used Python and Ansible to drive automation-first operations in large-scale enterprise environments.