Kafka Consultant / Kafka Platform Expert Brussels Belgium 6-Month Contract

Location: Brussels Belgium
Start Date: ASAP
Duration: 6 Months (Full-Time)

Were looking for an experienced Kafka Consultant to support a major project focused on optimizing and operationalizing an enterprise Apache Kafka platform.

This role is ideal for a senior consultant with deep expertise in Kafka architecture distributed systems and event-driven platforms who enjoys solving complex infrastructure challenges and mentoring technical teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Assess and optimize an existing Apache Kafka infrastructure.
• Design and document governance operational standards and best practices for the Kafka platform.
• Improve the reliability scalability and operational readiness of the platform.
• Design event-driven architectures supporting microservices and Change Data Capture (CDC).
• Build and optimize data pipelines using Apache Kafka.
• Configure and manage Kafka topics partitions replication and retention policies.
• Review and optimize Kafka Connect architectures and connectors.
• Improve platform monitoring and observability using Grafana and related tools.
• Develop troubleshooting procedures to ensure high availability and platform resilience.
• Implement security best practices including TLS SASL and ACLs.
• Share knowledge with internal teams through documentation and technical coaching.

Required Skills

Apache Kafka

• Expert knowledge of Apache Kafka
• Kafka Brokers
• KRaft
• Schema Registry
• Kafka Streams
• Kafka Connect

Infrastructure & Architecture

• Distributed Systems
• Event-Driven Architecture
• Microservices
• Containerized Kafka platforms (Strimzi Confluent or similar)
• Ansible

Monitoring

• Grafana
• Monitoring and observability best practices

Nice to Have

• Apache Iceberg
• Apache Spark
• Apache Flink
• Streaming Data Platforms

What Were Looking For

• Proven experience deploying operating and optimizing enterprise Kafka platforms.
• Strong architecture and troubleshooting skills.
• Experience working in production environments with high-availability systems.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving abilities.
• Ability to document technical governance and operational procedures.
• Strong communication skills and willingness to mentor technical teams.

Languages

• French Native
• English Professional
• Dutch Passive knowledge

Contract Details

Location: Brussels Belgium

Contract: Full-Time

Start: ASAP

Duration: 6 Months

If you have extensive experience with Apache Kafka and are looking for your next contract opportunity wed love to hear from you.