The candidate should have strong hands-on expertise in Apache Kafka, Confluent Platform, and Confluent Cloud, including cluster design, topic management, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, RBAC, ACLs, quotas, security, monitoring, troubleshooting, and performance tuning. The candidate should have practical knowledge of Kafka security setup, including SASL_SSL, mTLS, certificates, secrets, service accounts, identity pools, API keys, RBAC, ACLs, and secure connectivity patterns.