Integration Platform Engineer

At adidas, every day is a chance to flip the script. An invitation to take everything we know and re-invent it. Do it better. Never settling for good enough. Every day we get up, invent, adapt, improvise, find new ways to collaborate,  and do the unexpected. We’re creators, makers and doers. Helping athletes make  a difference, not just in their games, but in their lives and in their world. It’s an obsession. We’ve been doing this for more than 75 years. With an unmatched history and tradition  of creating iconic products, consumer connections and experiences, we’ve been defining  sport culture since the beginning. And we’re never done. Come be a part of shaping the future together with us. IT STARTS WITH YOU INTEGRATION PLATFORM ENGINEER
- API & EVENT STREAMING (Kafka, Kong, AWS)PLATFORM ENGINEERING / CLOUD NATIVE INTEGRATION PLATFORM PURPOSE:  Platform Engineering is the practice of designing, building and operating platforms for application engineering teams to leverage. The main goal of the central platform engineering team is to unlock the potential of the application teams, so they spend more time focusing on business functionality, increasing velocity, and reducing time to market. Moreover, the enterprise can better scale across its applications with similar platforms and shared microservices, making it easier to staff engineer assignments, as well as access enterprise information. We are looking for a Integration Platform Engineer to join the team that builds and operates our enterprise connectivity platform: the API Management and Event Streaming foundations on which our 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 don't need to arrive as a Kafka or Kong expert. We value solid engineering fundamentals, systems thinking and the curiosity to grow into the stack. What is essential is a collaborative, team-first mindset, a genuine eagerness to learn, and the habit of staying up to date with technology, including modern AI-assisted engineering practices. KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES: Operate and evolve our API Management platform: API gateway configuration (routes, services, plugins, consumers), API lifecycle and versioning, traffic policies (rate limiting, throttling, quotas), API security (authentication/authorization, OAuth2/OIDC, API keys, mTLS), and developer onboarding through a developer portal / self-service catalog. Operate and evolve our event streaming platform on Apache Kafka: topics, partitions, consumer groups, offset and consumer-lag management, schema management (Schema Registry), dead-letter queues, retries, idempotency and delivery guarantees. Design and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Helm) and GitOps workflows: Git as the single source of truth, environment promotion, drift detection and safe rollbacks. Build and improve CI/CD pipelines that make building, testing and deploying platform changes automated and reproducible, minimizing manual toil. Apply networking and security fundamentals daily: TCP/IP, HTTP semantics, DNS, load balancing, TLS/mTLS, secrets management, RBAC and least-privilege access. Own observability and reliability for the platform: logs, metrics, traces, golden signals, actionable alerting and incident response with blameless post-incident learning. Champion a self-service, platform-as-a-product mindset: documentation, automation and tooling that let product teams help themselves. Work closely with product teams, SRE, security and network engineers across the organization. Clear communication and constructive teamwork are core to the role. Use AI as a first-class engineering tool: AI coding assistants and AI agents in daily development, and contributing to our agentic AIOps initiatives (e.g., diagnostic agents integrating via MCP servers with observability and ITSM tooling). Lead specific cloud-native integration initiatives end to end with full autonomy: plan and estimate the work, coordinate available resources, track logged work, foresee and unblock blockers, and drive delivery. WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR: College or university degree with focus on IT, or equivalent combination of education and experience. Min 5 years of IT experience. Strong interpersonal and communication skills. Proficient English skills (verbal and written). Required technical skills (role‑dependent): Solid software engineering fundamentals: clean, readable, testable code; unit/integration testing mindset; structured problem decomposition. Systems thinking on distributed systems: synchronous vs. asynchronous communication, request/response vs. messaging, buffering, backpressure, queues, retries, idempotency and failure modes. Cloud experience, specifically AWS: core services, IAM, networking (VPC, subnets, security groups), and operating workloads in the cloud. Hands-o