Head of Platform

This role is for one of the Weekday's clients

Min Experience: 14 years

Location: Bengaluru

JobType: full-time

We are looking for a seasoned Head of Platform to lead and architect the platform engineering function for our high-scale, real-time data-driven systems. This is a strategic leadership role, ideal for an expert with deep experience in Kafka, Kafka Streams, and streaming architectures, who can drive technical excellence while enabling business growth through reliable and scalable platforms. You will lead a team of engineers, shape the platform roadmap, and ensure our systems meet the highest standards of performance, reliability, and scalability.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead and manage the platform engineering team, setting technical direction, priorities, and architecture standards.
• Own the design, development, and scaling of real-time streaming data pipelines using Kafka, Kafka Streams, and associated technologies.
• Architect solutions for high-throughput, low-latency data processing, ensuring robust event-driven architectures.
• Define and implement best practices for Kafka-based microservices, event sourcing, and stream processing.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, and business teams to understand requirements and translate them into platform solutions.
• Drive platform modernization initiatives, ensuring high availability, fault tolerance, and optimal resource utilization.
• Establish monitoring, alerting, and observability frameworks to maintain operational excellence for streaming platforms.
• Mentor and grow engineering talent, fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and technical excellence.
• Evaluate emerging technologies in streaming, messaging, and distributed systems to continually improve the platform.
• Lead incident management for platform-related issues and oversee root cause analysis and preventive measures.

Must-Have Skills & Expertise:

• Extensive hands-on experience with Kafka, Kafka Streams, and real-time streaming architectures.
• Proven ability to design and operate high-scale, fault-tolerant, distributed streaming platforms.
• Strong knowledge of event-driven architectures, message brokers, stream processing, and microservices.
• Experience with performance tuning, partitioning strategies, replication, and disaster recovery in Kafka ecosystems.
• Proficiency with associated technologies like Zookeeper, KSQL, Schema Registry, and related cloud-based streaming solutions.
• Solid background in Java, Scala, or other JVM-based languages used in streaming application development.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD, DevOps practices, containerization, and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Excellent leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills.
• Experience in scaling engineering teams and managing multi-functional platform initiatives.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• Experience in financial services, e-commerce, or high-volume data platforms.
• Exposure to data analytics frameworks (Spark, Flink) is a plus.