Event Architect, Kafka at Santander Bank

The Impact You Will Generate

Santander is looking for a Kafka Event Architect. We are redefining our way of working through innovation, cutting-edge technology, collaboration, and the freedom to explore new ideas.

In this role, your main responsibilities will include:

• Design and lead the event and streaming architecture within Santander: define the central platform based on Apache Kafka (or commercial equivalent), its components, usage patterns, governance, and scalability.
• Establish standards, libraries, frameworks, and best practices for building event pipelines, event-oriented microservices, CDC (Change-Data-Capture), and reactive architectures.
• Collaborate with data teams (engineering, analytics), infrastructure, security, and business to define event-oriented use cases: real-time monitoring, alerts, customer 360, fraud, digital transformation, etc.
• Ensure that the solution is highly scalable, resilient, secure, and complies with financial sector regulations (e.g., GDPR, PCI-DSS, data protection).
• Conduct prototypes, proof-of-concepts, and evangelize internally about the benefits of streaming/event-driven: latency, decoupling, business flexibility.
• Supervise technological evolution: Kafka versions, consumer/producer architecture, schema registry, security (SASL/Kerberos/ACLs), cloud integrations (AWS MSK, Confluent Cloud, etc.).
• Accompany the data architecture team in the implementation of advanced patterns such as Outbox Pattern, Event Sourcing, CQRS, and data contracts between domains as used in mature streaming architectures.
• Participate in defining the technological roadmap for the event platform, evaluate vendors, open-source, licensing, total cost of ownership, and internal team training.

What You Will Bring to the Team

The following requirements represent the essential knowledge, skills, and competencies for this position.

Professional Experience

• 3-5 years of experience in data engineering, distributed systems, or event/streaming architecture. (Mandatory)

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, Telecommunications, Systems, or similar.

Technical Skills

• Solid experience in event or streaming platforms with Kafka (or equivalents). Having implemented Kafka clusters in production, managed connectors, topic design, partitioning, replication, fault tolerance.