Open to opportunities

John Mannooparambil

@johnmannooparambil

Message

I build resilient Kafka metadata, recovery, and observability systems for multi-cloud production infrastructure.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I'm looking to build and operate resilient distributed systems, especially cloud infrastructure, Kafka platforms, metadata services, observability, and production reliability tooling.

At Confluent, I build and operate Kafka metadata systems across cloud and on-premises environments. I led a KIP to consolidate cluster-initialization metadata formatting, created recovery tools for metadata integrity incidents, and serve as a metadata SME during high-severity outages.

I've also delivered RPC compatibility validation in CI/CD, Kafka metadata stress testing and fault injection, and a zero-downtime migration from Datadog to Grafana/AMP. I own ZooKeeper fleet security and releases, contribute to 24/7 incident response, and previously built a diagnostic utility that enabled real-time cloud Kafka metadata introspection without service restarts.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Software Engineer

Current

Confluent

Sep 2025 - Present (11 months)

Spearheaded end-to-end delivery of a KIP to consolidate dual metadata formatting processes, eliminating manual intervention while maintaining protocol invariants. Designed recovery tools for metadata integrity and served as Metadata SME for high-severity incidents, authoring RCA reports for Kafka outages.

Java Scala Python Kafka ZooKeeper AWS Azure GCP Kubernetes Terraform Git GitHub Datadog Grafana AMP Claude Code Jenkins Semaphore Bazel Gradle Docker Halyard Ducktape OpenSearch BigQuery OTEL LaunchDarkly gRPC

Software Engineer

Confluent

Jul 2023 - Aug 2025 (2 years 1 month)

Engineered automated validation for production RPC schema invariants within CI/CD, enforcing backward compatibility. Led Kafka metadata stress testing and migration of monitoring from Datadog to Grafana/AMP, and owned ZooKeeper fleet lifecycle and security.

Java Scala Python Kafka ZooKeeper AWS Azure GCP Kubernetes Terraform Git GitHub Datadog Grafana AMP Jenkins Semaphore Bazel Gradle Docker Halyard Ducktape OpenSearch BigQuery OTEL LaunchDarkly gRPC

Software Engineer Intern

Confluent

May 2022 - Aug 2022 (3 months)

Designed and deployed a non-invasive diagnostic utility for real-time metadata introspection in cloud Kafka clusters, eliminating service restarts during incident investigations.

Java Kafka AWS GCP Kubernetes Docker Git GitHub