Senior Kafka Platform Engineer First Republic Bank
San Francisco, CA

Job Description

At First Republic, we care about our people. Founded in 1985, we offer extraordinary client service in private banking, private business banking and private wealth management. We believe that personal connections are everything and our success is driven by the relationships we form with our colleagues and clients. You'll always feel empowered and valued here.

Incredible teams doing exceptional work, every day

In Technology, we support First Republic's employees and clients through the acquisition, integration and management of the Bank's information technology systems and services. We drive innovation and explore emerging technologies so our people can be productive and focus on what matters most - providing extraordinary service.

The Senior Kafka Platform Engineer is a subject matter expert in messaging middleware platforms and data pipelines. This is a key role at FRB, as we modernize our data infrastructure and adopt industry best practices to ensure the platforms we provide to our business and clients are scalable, reliable, transparent and fit to purpose. This position will include a high degree of interaction with business and operations units to understand the functional needs of the users of the system as well as the various technology teams, both within and outside of FRB, which are responsible for integration points with the solutions. The role will then be a leading the evolution of our services as we move to a high transaction infrastructure. You'll have an opportunity to help shape the long term evolution of First Republic Bank's technology roadmap.

What you'll do as a Senior Kafka Platform Engineer:

* Strong Hands on experience in Kafka, Kafka Connect and ElasticSearch deployments and experience standing up, administering on Kafka platform.
* Provide subject matter expertise in Kafka brokers, zookeepers, Kafka connect, schema registry, KSQL, Rest proxy and Kafka Control center.
* Assist in the administration and operations of the Kafka platform like provisioning, access lists Kerberos and SSL configurations and Configuring Kafka for Performance and Resource Management.
* Establish best practices on use of Kafka, guide application teams on when and how to use Kafka.
* End-to-end understanding of software development methodologies and tool chains including build automation, server configuration management, version control, testing, code quality and release automation.
* Create topics, setup redundancy cluster, deploy monitoring tools, alerts and has good knowledge of best practices.
* Strong architectural understanding for heavily distributed applications (Micro Services) Familiarity with Java, Tomcat, Spring Boot.
* Ensure that the Kafka platform is able to connect with a lot of other applications and platforms.
* Collaborate with critical stakeholders to understand business needs, priority, and the quality of services and define the product design. Design for non-functional requirements such as security, scalability, resiliency, and performance in all solutions. Design for horizontally scalable solutions.
* Solves complex performance issues. Work with vendor to review products to meet the capabilities needs. Define and document best practices. Provide training, knowledge share, brown bag sessions, etc. Drive solution to be compliant with Target State Architecture. Drive enhancements to Target State Architecture to meet future business needs.
* Experience with clustering and high availability configurations and knowledge of AWS cloud.
* Prior success in automating a real-world production environment.
* Evaluate and introduce technology tools and processes to streamline operation of the integration platform and for streamlining use case execution for a diverse user community from multiple lines of business.
* Ensure the Kafka and Messaging platform can effectively meet performance & SLA requirements.
* Develop best practices for the management and engineering of the Integration platforms.

Knowledge in a Variety of Enterprise Supporting Technologies including:

* CI (e.g., Jenkins)
* Server Config Mgmt (e.g., Ansible, Chef, Puppet)
* Containers and Container Services (e.g., Docker, Kubnernetes)
* SCM (Git, GitHub) Packaging & Binary Repositories (Artifactory)
* Change/Issue Management (e.g., Jira, ServiceNow)
* Logging (e.g. Splunk)
* Monitoring (e.g. SolarWind)
* Scripting (e.g., Shell, PowerShell, Python, Ruby, Go, Groovy)

Ideal Candidate Qualities:

* Strong verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to work effectively collaborate with partners from business and technology organizations
* Take ownership of Platform architecture and drive it to the next level of effectiveness to support current and long term requirements
* Programming/development experience including Agile process (SCRUM, KANBAN)
* Must have solid hands on experience and clear understanding in the related technologies
* Should be able to confidently handle customer requirements
* Should be a self-starter to deliver project work
* Provide technical leadership to the Middleware Engineering - Integration Platform organization
* Strong organizational skills and attention to detail are required

Qualifications:

* At least 2 years experience with Kafka on prem or on Cloud
* At least 4 years Expertise with administering Messaging platforms like TIBCO EMS, MQ, RabbitMQ , Kafka
* At least 2 years experience with (Api Gateways, No sql db's, data anlystics)
* At least 1 year Experience in enabling the Platform as a Service with operationalizing that in mind to optimization, capacity planning & architecture of a large multi-tenant cluster
* Experience in working with container and container orchestration platforms is a plus
* Minimum of four-year technical degree, B.S. required. Masters will be highly regarded.
* At least 1 year Experience in tool Integration, automation, configuration management in GIT
* Excellent verbal and written communication, interpersonal and presentation skills, analytical and problem solving skills

Professional skill / competency:

* Expert at managing by influence to achieve goals through departments and staff not directly in a reporting relationship.
* Strong business orientation with broad experience with banking processes, technology and change initiatives.
* Understands business processes, appropriate application of technology in supporting those processes, and the common technical complexity / considerations when evaluating new products or process options.
* Skilled at identifying and evaluating existing operations and new developments and gauging appropriate opportunities for the business.
* Focus on development of organizational capabilities and resources to support continuous evolution of a more competitive and profitable Bank.

Leadership skill / competency:

* Experience with leading team(s)
* Demonstrated leadership, planning, and managerial skills with ability to contribute broadly at any level.
* Pragmatic with an ability to generate trust and build alliances across business and functional lines.
* Consistently demonstrates and follows high standards of integrity in business decision-making.

Personal skill / competency:

* Strategic perspective and business acumen. Looks toward the broadest possible view of an issue/ challenge; can easily pose future scenarios; can think globally about all aspects of the Bank; can discuss multiple considerations of an issue and forecast them into the future.
* Communication skills. Demonstrates excellent communication and interpersonal skills; able to communicate clearly and concisely in a variety of settings and styles; is effective in a variety of formal presentation and meeting settings; commands attention and can manage group process during presentation/ discussion.
* Change management. Gains support for change by providing context and responding with sensitivity to concerns; takes initiative to recommend/ develop innovative approaches to getting things done.
* Negotiation skills. Negotiates skillfully in tough situations with internal and external groups; can be both direct and diplomatic.
* Peer relationships. Can quickly find common ground and solve problems for the good of all; is a team player and encourages collaboration.

Own your work and your career - apply now

Are you willing to go the extra mile because you love what you do and how you can contribute as a team? Do you want the freedom to grow and the opportunity to take charge of your own career? If so, then come join us.

We want hard working team players. You'll have the independence to learn, lead and drive change. A culture of extraordinary service, empowerment and stability - that's the First Republic way.

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