Senior Platform Engineer, Event Streaming Platform (Kafka)

About the Role

We're looking for an experienced Platform Engineer to join Event Streaming team — the distributed team responsible for the Kafka infrastructure and event streaming systems that power business-critical workflows across Wolt, Deliveroo and DoorDash.

You'll be joining a team that operates at the intersection of Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering, building and running the streaming backbone that is used by thousands of services across 3 companies. This is deeply technical work: you'll own distributed systems at scale, contribute to long-term architecture decisions, and be working on the reliability of critical parts of infrastructure.

What You'll Be Doing

You’ll be joining the team within the broader Storage organisation. The team builds and operates highly reliable, scalable and efficient event streaming infrastructure, including Kafka, in-house Event Streaming abstraction (internally called Event Bus) and any future streaming platform technologies. These systems support critical workflows and are foundational to how engineering teams build reliable, event-driven products at scale.

Here’s what your day-to-day might look like:

• Design, build and operate large-scale, event streaming infrastructure that supports critical production workloads.
• Improve the reliability, scalability, observability and automation of Kafka, Event Bus and related streaming components.
• Debug complex distributed systems issues — latency issues, performance bottlenecks, capacity constraints, partition imbalances — and drive them to resolution.
• Build infrastructure automation and self-healing capabilities that reduce operational toil and improve platform resilience.
• Contribute to the team’s 24/7 On-call rotation and incident response, and drive continuous improvement through pre-mortems, operational readiness checklists and post-mortem action items.
• Partner closely with other teams within Storage organization and wider Core Infrastructure org, like SRE, Data Platform, and Caching teams across EU and US regions — including occasional collaboration in the EU evening hours.
• Shape the long-term architecture and evolution of our event streaming platform, contributing to RFCs and technical strategy.

What You'll Need to Thrive

• Strong hands-on experience building or operating distributed systems in production.
• Deep experience with Kafka or similar event streaming systems, either as a platform, infrastructure service or critical production dependency.
• Strong coding ability in Java, Go, Python or similar — with the emphasis on building reliable, production-grade systems and libraries.
• Experience operating scalable production infrastructure, including debugging, troubleshooting and improving reliability.
• Strong understanding of infrastructure automation, observability, capacity management and operational excellence.
• Good fundamentals in Linux, networking and JVM-based systems, or curiosity to deepen expertise in these areas.
• Strong communication and writing skills, with the ability to work across platform, infrastructure and product engineering teams.

Nice to have

• Experience contributing to Kafka or related open source distributed systems.
• Experience with Redpanda, WarpStream, AutoMQ, Pulsar or similar streaming technologies.
• Experience with JVM tuning, broker tuning, partition management or Cruise Control.
• Experience with tiered storage, diskless streaming architectures or multi-region event streaming platforms.