Senior Kafka Platform Engineer

Location: Berlin; London; Paris

Department: Site Reliability Engineering

Please note that these positions are based in London, Berlin or Paris — relocation support is provided if required.

THE BEST WORK OF YOUR CAREER

Trade Republic is the largest savings platform in Europe — we operate in 18 countries, serving +10 million customers who trust us with over €150B in assets. But we're striving for more.

We have a bold mission to empower everyone to build wealth with easy, safe, and free access to financial systems. You will have the opportunity to grow your career by collaborating with a team of outstanding talents and state of the art technology to build a lasting, positive future for millions.

ABOUT PLATFORM ENGINEERING

Platform Engineering is the backbone of Trade Republic's engineering velocity. Our mission is to build scalable platforms for a Europe-scale bank — serving internal engineers, and building in-house control planes for managing the bank's infrastructure. We’re a ~50-person Platform team focused on one thing: enabling product engineers to move fast and operate autonomously by default.

We build self-service platforms, golden paths, and opinionated tooling so that over 400 engineers can ship with confidence. From Kubernetes fleet management and CI/CD to an internal Developer Hub built on Backstage, our work underpins every trade, savings plan, and card payment that flows through the platform.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

Kafka is becoming the central nervous system of Trade Republic — connecting trading, banking, financial crime detection, and more in real time. Today, scaling our Kafka infrastructure to match the pace of the business means too much manual work, too much operational toil, and not enough time building the platform it could be. We are changing that — treating Kafka clusters as fungible shards of a larger resource pool, with a Temporal-backed control plane, Backstage-integrated self-service, and transparent multi-cluster routing that gives product engineers a zero-config experience.

• Run Kafka at scale: Own the reliability and uptime of our Kafka fleet — design for high availability across domains and shards, engineer for resilience, and ensure near-zero downtime across maintenance, upgrades, and failure scenarios.
• Build the streaming platform: Design and implement the control plane that makes the multi-cluster platform real — cluster lifecycle automation, topic and ACL provisioning, cross-shard replication, and the self-service interfaces that let product engineers onboard without understanding the infrastructure underneath.
• Make streaming best practices the default: Define standards for how product engineers produce and consume — topic design, schema management, consumer group patterns, and reliability practices — and embed them into the platform so the right thing is always the easiest thing.
• Own the platform end to end: Participate in the on-call rotation, ensuring full ownership of the systems you build and operate.
• Own the direction: Shape the roadmap, drive cross-team initiatives, and align the streaming platform with broader engineering and business goals.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• 4+ years of experience in streaming, platform engineering, or a related systems discipline.
• We are hiring from senior to staff level — whether you are a strong Kafka engineer ready to take on platform ownership, or you have already been leading streaming platform strategy across large engineering organisations, we'd love to hear from you.
• Deep, hands-on Kafka expertise: you have run self-hosted Kafka in production and have strong opinions on cluster architecture, scaling, replication, multi-cluster design, performance tuning, and security.
• Solid backend engineering background — Go is preferred but any strong language is welcome; familiarity with Kotlin/JVM is a plus as you'll work directly with product teams who rely on it.
• A track record of turning streaming best practices into opinionated standards that engineering teams actually adopt.
• Cloud-native in your DNA: hands-on with Kubernetes and IaC tooling, running production workloads on AWS or equivalent.
• Ability to drive cross-team initiatives and clearly communicate architectural trade-offs to both engineers and leadership.
• The ability to work in a flexible hybrid setup, with 2-3 days a week in the office.

WHY YOU SHOULD APPLY NOW

Our culture rewards ownership, excellence, and high energy. We care deeply about outcomes and hold each other accountable — we're here to win and fix one of the largest challenges Europeans face — closing the pension gap and democratising wealth. If this gets you fired up, reach out!