Temporary Cloud engineer for streaming platform

About Proximus NXT
Proximus NXT Luxembourg supports all organizations in their digital transformation, by providing holistic ICT & Telecommunication solutions, as well as tailored managed services. With our partners and customers, we co-create opportunities and enable growth in a secure and sustainable manner. As a result of our unique expertise in next-gen IT services, mobile and advanced connectivity, we help our customers achieve their ambitions and realize their vision.
Together with them and our partners we implement sovereign and trusted solutions that make people work smarter.- Your mission:
We are looking for a skilled o to lead the technical evaluation of Apache Pulsar as a next-generation event streaming platform for a multi-cloud and hybrid (sovereign cloud + on-premises) environment. The ideal candidate will design, deploy, and benchmark Pulsar clusters across CleverCloud (sovereign) and AWS (public cloud), assess protocol compatibility with existing Kafka and JMS workloads, and validate geo-replication, fault tolerance, and observability capabilities. This role requires strong experience with distributed messaging systems, cloud-native architecture design, and the ability to produce clear architectural assessments and recommendations that drive business decisions.
Key Responsibilities
• Architecture Design & Evaluation: Lead the architectural assessment of Apache Pulsar as a replacement/extension of the existing Kafka-based event streaming platform. Design target-state architectures for intra-cloud, cross-cloud, and hybrid (cloud ↔ on-premises) messaging scenarios.
• Pulsar Deployment & Configuration: Deploy, configure, and operate Apache Pulsar clusters on CleverCloud (managed) and on-premises (containerised on OpenShift/Kubernetes).
• Performance Benchmarking: Design and execute performance tests at varying message sizes (KB/MB), load levels (messages/second), and tenant configurations. Compare results against existing on-premises Kafka cluster baselines (non-prod and prod).
• Protocol Compatibility Assessment: Evaluate Kafka-on-Pulsar protocol handlers (Starlight for Kafka, StreamNative KSN) and Pulsar JMS support. Prototype migration of an existing Kafka application and a JMS-based application to Pulsar with minimal code changes.
• Geo-Replication & Hybrid Architecture: Configure and validate Pulsar geo-replication between sovereign cloud (CleverCloud), public cloud (AWS), and on-premises clusters. Assess latency, disaster recovery, and cross-environment read/write scenarios.
• Observability & Monitoring: Integrate Pulsar monitoring with existing corporate tools (Dynatrace, Grafana, Splunk, OpenSearch). Validate that operational visibility is sufficient for production readiness.
• Multi-Tenancy Validation: Configure and test Pulsar's native multi-tenancy model (tenants, namespaces, access policies) to confirm suitability for a shared-cluster enterprise model.
• Documentation & Recommendations: Produce clear POC findings, architecture decision records (ADRs), and a final recommendation on Pulsar's suitability for the corporate event streaming platform.
• Collaboration: Work closely with the Kafka operations team, solution architects, application teams (for migration prototyping).
• Training & Knowledge Sharing: Contribute to the knowledge base; provide technical guidance to stakeholders on event streaming architecture patterns and Pulsar capabilities.
Your profile:
Required Skills & Experience
• 5+ years of experience in Cloud Architecture, distributed systems engineering, or messaging platform design and operations.
• Strong hands-on experience with Apache Kafka (architecture, operations, tuning, troubleshooting) - understanding of brokers, partitions, replication, consumer groups, and Kafka Connect.
• Knowledge of Apache Pulsar (architecture concepts: brokers, BookKeeper, topics, tenants, namespaces, geo-replication) or demonstrated ability to ramp up quickly on comparable distributed systems.
• Experience designing multi-cloud and hybrid architectures - integrating services across public cloud (AWS), sovereign cloud, and on-premises infrastructure.
• Proficiency in containerised deployments - Kubernetes/OpenShift, Helm charts, container lifecycle management.
• Proficiency in scripting and automation - Python, Bash, and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Ansible).
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools - Dynatrace, Grafana, Splunk, or OpenSearch.
• Experience with CI/CD and GitOps - GitLab CI, ArgoCD, or similar; understanding of GitOps principles for infrastructure configuration.
• Understanding of messaging protocols - JMS 2.0, Kafka protocol, AMQP - and experience with protocol bridging or migration.
• Knowledge of Apache Pulsar protocol handlers - Starlight for Kafka (DataStax), StreamNative KSN, Pulsar JMS - or willingness to evaluat