Integration Platform Engineer - API & Event Streaming (Kafka, Kong, AWS)

Purpose

Platform Engineering is the practice of designing, building and operating platforms for application engineering teams to leverage. The central platform engineering team helps application teams focus on business functionality, increase velocity, and reduce time to market.

We are looking for an Integration Platform Engineer to join the team that builds and operates adidas's enterprise connectivity platform: the API Management and Event Streaming foundations on which product teams expose, secure and consume APIs and events. You will help run a self-service platform built around an API Gateway (Kong) and a distributed event streaming platform (Apache Kafka), delivered cloud-natively on AWS with GitOps and Infrastructure-as-Code.

You do not need to arrive as a Kafka or Kong expert. We value solid engineering fundamentals, systems thinking, curiosity, collaboration, eagerness to learn, and staying up to date with technology, including modern AI-assisted engineering practices.

Key Accountabilities

• Operate and evolve the API Management platform, including gateway configuration, API lifecycle and versioning, traffic policies, API security, and developer onboarding through a developer portal or self-service catalog.
• Operate and evolve the Apache Kafka event streaming platform, including topics, partitions, consumer groups, offsets, consumer lag, schema management, dead-letter queues, retries, idempotency, and delivery guarantees.
• Design and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code using Terraform and Helm, plus GitOps workflows with environment promotion, drift detection, and safe rollbacks.
• Build and improve CI/CD pipelines that automate and standardize platform changes.
• Apply networking and security fundamentals, including TCP/IP, HTTP, DNS, load balancing, TLS/mTLS, secrets management, RBAC, and least-privilege access.
• Own observability and reliability through logs, metrics, traces, golden signals, actionable alerting, and incident response.
• Champion a self-service, platform-as-a-product mindset through documentation, automation, and tooling.
• Work closely with product teams, SRE, security, and network engineers.
• Use AI coding assistants and AI agents in daily development and contribute to agentic AIOps initiatives.
• Lead cloud-native integration initiatives end to end, including planning, estimation, resource coordination, work tracking, and blocker removal.

What We Are Looking For

• College or university degree focused on IT, or equivalent education and experience.
• Minimum 5 years of IT experience.
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills and proficient English.
• Software engineering fundamentals, including clean, testable code and structured problem decomposition.
• Distributed-systems understanding, including messaging, buffering, backpressure, retries, idempotency, and failure modes.
• AWS experience, including core services, IAM, VPCs, subnets, security groups, and cloud workloads.
• Hands-on experience with containers, Kubernetes, and cloud-native tooling.
• Infrastructure-as-Code and GitOps experience with Terraform and/or Helm, Git workflows, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Networking, security, and observability fundamentals.
• Practical experience with AI-assisted development, AI agents, and MCP servers.
• Autonomy in leading cloud-native integration initiatives and managing delivery risks.
• A strong problem-diagnosis mindset with the ability to evaluate technical options and trade-offs.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with Apache Kafka and API management concepts.
• Experience with agentic AI systems, tool calling, MCP server development, or AIOps.
• Experience with observability stacks such as Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, Loki, or Instana, and ITSM tooling such as ServiceNow.

What Matters Most

• Teamworking and clear technical communication.
• Eagerness to learn and pick up new technologies.
• Staying current with technology trends and experimenting with new tools.
• Ownership of outcomes beyond assigned tasks.
• A self-service mindset that reduces toil.

What We Offer

• Digital transformation, innovation, and continuous improvement as core cultural principles.
• A talented, multinational team with international career opportunities.
• Individual development, training, and a technology community.
• Hybrid work with a flexible remote environment of up to 40% weekly combined with onsite facilities and culture.
• Competitive salary, benefits, and discounts on adidas products.