Staff Engineer
PhonePe · Bengaluru · 8+ yrs experience · Posted 2026-05-18
Tech stack: Kafka
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About the role
Responsibilities:
- We are building an in-house team to maintain and contribute to our internal Apache Kafka distribution.
- This is not an operations role — you will work on the Kafka codebase itself: the broker, the KRaft controller, the protocol, the clients, and the storage layer.
- You will be our technical anchor for all things Kafka internals, driving upstream contributions, backporting critical fixes, and shaping our internal distribution to meet the needs of a large-scale production fleet.
- We already do this successfully with GlusterFS, where we maintain an in-house distribution backed by deep upstream expertise.
- We want to replicate that model for Kafka.
- Own our internal Kafka distribution: branch management, patch curation, release cutting, upgrade planning
- Contribute upstream to Apache Kafka — bug fixes, KIPs, code reviews, design discussions
- Diagnose and fix deep broker/controller issues: replication, partition reassignment, KRaft consensus, log storage, ISR management, protocol handling
- Build custom patches for production needs that aren't suitable for upstream (performance tuning for our workload profile, observability hooks, operational safety valves)
- Establish engineering practices for Kafka development within the team: how we test, how we benchmark, how we validate patches before rolling them out
- Mentor a supporting engineer and grow the team's capability over time
- Act as the internal authority on Kafka internals — advise platform teams on configuration, capacity planning, and architectural decisions that require knowledge of broker behavior
- Act as the primary interface for audit and compliance teams, ensuring PhonePe Kafka distribution meets various compliance and regulatory standards
Qualifications:
- Deep familiarity with the Kafka codebase — you have read, modified, and debugged the broker, controller, or client internals.
- Not just operated Kafka, but worked on it.
- Track record of upstream contribution — committed patches, participated in KIP discussions, reviewed PRs, or equivalent engagement with the Apache Kafka community.
- Active committer/PMC status is strongly preferred but not strictly required if your contribution history demonstrates equivalent depth.
- Strong distributed systems fundamentals — consensus protocols, replication, exactly-once semantics, log-structured storage, distributed state machines.
- You understand these not as buzzwords but as engineering tradeoffs you've navigated.
- Systems-level programming comfort — JVM internals (GC tuning, memory layout, JIT behavior), OS-level I/O (page cache, fsync semantics, zero-copy), networking (TCP tuning, socket buffers).
- Kafka performance work lives at this layer.
- Experience maintaining a fork or distribution — you've managed the tension between carrying local patches and staying mergeable with upstream.
- You know what it costs to diverge and how to minimize that cost.
- 8+ years of experience in systems/infrastructure software engineering, with a meaningful portion spent on Kafka or comparable distributed systems (Pulsar, Bookkeeper, Zookeeper, etcd, CockroachDB, etc.)
- Apache Kafka Committer or PMC member
- Experience with KRaft (the ZooKeeper-free controller)
- Authored or co-authored a KIP
- Experience with Kafka Streams or Kafka Connect internals (not just usage)`
- Familiarity with Kafka's test infrastructure (system tests, Trogdor, ducktape)
Qualifications
- Deep familiarity with the Kafka codebase —
- you have read, modified, and debugged the broker, controller, or client internals.
- Not just operated Kafka, but worked on it.
- Track record of upstream contribution — committed patches, participated in KIP discussions, reviewed PRs, or equivalent engagement with the Apache Kafka community.
- Active committer/PMC status is strongly preferred but not strictly required if your contribution history demonstrates equivalent depth.
- Strong distributed systems fundamentals — consensus protocols, replication, exactly-once semantics, log-structured storage, distributed state machines.
- You understand these not as buzzwords but as engineering tradeoffs you've navigated.
- Systems-level programming comfort
- JVM internals (GC tuning, memory layout, JIT behavior), OS-level I/O (page cache, fsync semantics, zero-copy), networking (TCP tuning, socket buffers).
- Kafka performance work lives at this layer.
- Experience maintaining a fork or distribution — you've managed the tension between carrying local patches and staying mergeable with upstream.
- You know what it costs to diverge and how to minimize that cost.
- 8+ years of experience in systems/infrastructure software engineering, with a meaningful portion spent on Kafka or comparable distributed systems (Pulsar, Bookkeeper, Zookeeper, etcd, CockroachDB, etc.)
- Apache Kafka Committer or PMC member
- Experience with KRaft (the ZooKeeper-free controller)
- Authored or co-authored a KIP
- Experience with Kafka Streams or Kafka Connect internals (not just usage)`
- Familiarity with Kafka's test infrastructure (system tests, Trogdor, ducktape)
Responsibilities
- We are building an in-house team to maintain and contribute to our internal Apache Kafka distribution.
- This is not an operations role — you will work on the Kafka codebase itself: the broker, the KRaft controller, the protocol, the clients, and the storage layer.
- You will be our technical anchor for all things Kafka internals
- driving upstream contributions, backporting critical fixes, and shaping our internal distribution to meet the needs of a large-scale production fleet.
- We already do this successfully with GlusterFS, where we maintain an in-house distribution backed by deep upstream expertise.
- We want to replicate that model for Kafka.
- Own our internal Kafka distribution: branch management, patch curation, release cutting, upgrade planning
- Contribute upstream to Apache Kafka — bug fixes, KIPs, code reviews, design discussions
- Diagnose and fix deep broker/controller issues: replication, partition reassignment, KRaft consensus, log storage, ISR management, protocol handling
- Build custom patches for production needs that aren't suitable for upstream (performance tuning for our workload profile, observability hooks, operational safety valves)
- Establish engineering practices for Kafka development within the team: how we test, how we benchmark, how we validate patches before rolling them out
- Mentor a supporting engineer and grow the team's capability over time
- Act as the internal authority on Kafka internals — advise platform teams on configuration, capacity planning, and architectural decisions that require knowledge of broker behavior
- Act as the primary interface for audit and compliance teams, ensuring PhonePe Kafka distribution meets various compliance and regulatory standards