Senior Kafka Platform Engineer in London

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

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

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

• 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

• 5+ years in infrastructure, platform engineering, or a related SRE/systems discipline.
• Production Kubernetes at the control-plane level — CRDs, the reconciliation model, and writing/operating controllers or operators — with hands-on Cluster API (CAPA/CAPI) managing clusters as versioned resources, not hand-maintained infrastructure.
• Zero-downtime migration of live production clusters onto a managed GitOps lifecycle — not just greenfield provisioning.
• Building an infrastructure control plane with Crossplane (authoring compositions/XRDs) or a comparable reconciler.
• Terraform expected — but this role is continuous reconciliation, not one-shot provisioning.
• GitOps at fleet scale with Flux (or Argo CD) as the single source of truth, including versioned add-on rollout across the fleet with per-environment config overrides.
• Strong AWS networking: VPC/IPAM, private-only endpoints, PrivateLink/VPC Endpoint Services, cross-account IAM (IRSA), Cilium/CNI internals, and DNS at scale.
• Backend engineering in Go — you’ll write and operate custom control-plane components, not just YAML and Helm.
• Own it in production: on-call for what you build, making it observable (CAPI/Flux state → metrics, SLOs, alerts), and weighing reliability, compliance, and cost.
• 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! We believe it’s our team’s varied identities and backgrounds that make us sharper and stronger. We’re committed to creating an environment where everyone feels respected and has equal opportunity to thrive in their careers.