Streaming Platform: Kafka, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Streams, ZooKeeper/KRaft

DevOps/CI-CD: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps

Container Platform: Kubernetes, Helm, ArgoCD

Cloud: AWS, Azure, GCP

Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, Dynatrace, Confluent Control Centre

Supporting: Terraform, Ansible

1. Core Kafka Expertise (Must-Have)

Kafka architecture: brokers, topics, partitions, replication
Kafka components: Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Streams, ZooKeeper/Kraft
Topic & partition management, consumer groups
Performance tuning, retention, throughput optimisation
Cluster setup, upgrades, scaling and failover
Troubleshooting (eg lag, ISR, leader issues)
Security: SSL/TLS, ACLs, authentication, encryption

2. DevOps & Automation Skills (Must-Have)
CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, etc.)
Configuration management and deployment automation

3. Kubernetes & Container Platform Expertise (Must-Have)
Understanding of Kubernetes technologies
Helm charts, ArgoCD/GitOps workflows
ConfigMaps, Secrets, cert management
Rolling updates, pod life cycle, scaling

4. Cloud Engineering (Must-Have)
Understanding of any one of the Cloud platforms: AWS/Azure/GCP

5. Monitoring, Observability & Reliability (Must-Have)
Monitoring tools: Prometheus, Grafana, Dynatrace, Confluent Control Centre
Alerting & SRE practices