Kafka Architect / Streaming Data Architect

About the Company

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is a global IT services, consulting, and business solutions company with a legacy of over 50 years in supporting the digital transformation of top enterprises worldwide. Leveraging a consulting-led, cognition-powered approach, TCS delivers integrated business, technology, and engineering services through its unique Location Independent Agile™ development model. As part of the Tata group, India's largest multinational conglomerate, TCS employs over 616,171 professionals representing 157 nationalities across 53 countries.

Job Overview

We are seeking a Kafka Architect / Streaming Data Architect based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to lead the design and implementation of enterprise-grade streaming data architectures, focusing on Kafka and real-time data ecosystems primarily in the banking sector.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop enterprise-scale Kafka infrastructure aligned with Bank Lakehouse architecture layers (Bronze, Silver, Gold).
• Define event-driven patterns enabling real-time data ingestion and processing.
• Formulate topic management strategies including partitioning, replication, and data retention policies.
• Architect multi-cluster Kafka environments for development, testing, production, and disaster recovery.
• Ensure precise point-in-time data recovery and fault tolerance mechanisms.
• Lead the setup and configuration of Kafka brokers, Zookeeper or Kraft mode, Kafka Connect framework, and Schema Registry.
• Implement stream processing using Kafka Streams, Spark Streaming, or Apache Flink.
• Integrate Kafka with platforms such as Cloudera Data Platform (CDP), Informatica ETL/ELT, Teradata data warehouses, and Denodo virtualization layers.
• Design data ingestion pipelines supporting event streaming, near real-time batch processing, and Change Data Capture (CDC) using Debezium.
• Support ingestion from various source systems including incremental and historical data loads.
• Optimize system performance to maintain high throughput, low latency, and support concurrent consumer access.
• Refine partitioning strategies, consumer group scaling, and producer tuning parameters such as acks, batching, and data compression.
• Implement failover, data replication strategies ensuring >99.9% uptime, and mechanisms to handle hardware failures and data corruption.
• Design error handling frameworks including retries and dead-letter queues.
• Enforce data security measures including role-based access control, encryption in transit and at rest, and data masking/tokenization compliant with data classification policies.
• Integrate with metadata, lineage tools, and governance frameworks such as NDMO/NDI.
• Establish comprehensive monitoring utilizing Cloudera Manager, Kafka metrics (JMX, Prometheus, Grafana), define alerting thresholds, and oversee SLAs for pipeline ingestion.
• Conduct remediation assessments of existing Kafka pipelines to identify defective flows and realign components to target architectures and data models (FSLDM/FSAS).
• Ensure real-time data availability and consistency across reporting layers, optimize query performance, and troubleshoot issues affecting reporting.
• Produce and maintain architectural documentation including high-level and low-level designs, topic catalogs, schema definitions, data lineage, and source-to-target mappings.
• Participate in architecture governance and change management boards.

Technical Expertise Required

• Hands-on experience with Cloudera Kafka is essential.
• Proficiency in Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, and Schema Registry technologies (Avro, Protobuf, JSON).
• Familiarity with data ecosystem tools such as Cloudera Data Platform (CDP), Apache Spark, Flink (preferred), Informatica, Teradata, and Denodo.
• Knowledge of CDC solutions, preferably Debezium, REST APIs, and microservices integration patterns.
• Optional but advantageous skills include Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD pipeline deployment, and Linux environment management.
• Strong background in BFSI domain, specifically banking regulatory reporting, data reconciliation with high accuracy, AML, payments, and trade finance system knowledge.

Soft Skills

• Excellent stakeholder management across business and IT teams.
• Experience navigating multi-vendor environments and large-scale transformational projects.
• Strong analytical mindset with proven problem-solving and root cause analysis capabilities.

Additional Information

The application process closes on July 30, 2026. The position is full-time and based on-site in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. For privacy details, refer to the company's privacy policy.