Senior Kafka Administrator

About the Engagement: We’re seeking a senior contract Kafka/Confluent administrator to own and evolve our on‑prem event streaming platform, with a primary focus on Confluent Platform. You will lead planning and execution of a hardware refresh for our on‑prem clusters, drive reliability and performance, and embed DevOps/automation across provisioning, deployment, observability, and incident response. Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK is desired for secondary support and cross‑environment alignment. Comprehensive documentation and runbooks are required deliverables.

Kafka Platform Support Key Responsibilities

o Design, deploy, and operate highly available Kafka clusters (on-prem, cloud, and/or managed services such as Confluent Cloud or AWS MSK).

o Manage topics, partitions, quotas, retention policies, and consumer group strategies for performance and cost.

o Own upgrades, patches, and migrations.

o Implement and manage Kafka components: Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker/Confluent Replicator, REST Proxy; familiarity with Kafka Streams and ksqlDB is a plus.

o Performance tuning (producers/consumers, batching, compression, acks, ISR, controller health), throughput testing, and benchmarking.

o Capacity planning, partitioning strategy, and cluster right-sizing.

Contract Deliverables

· Hardware refresh plan: capacity model, sizing, architecture diagrams, migration/cutover strategy, risk register

· Implement and validated on-prem clusters on refreshed hardware with performance benchmarks

· Operational documentation: standards, runbooks, monitoring/alerts configuration, backup/restore and DR playbooks.

· Knowledge transfer sessions and documentation handoff at milestones and project close.

Minimum Qualifications

· 5+ years in systems/platform engineering, SRE, or DevOps; 4+ years operating Kafka in production at scale.

· Deep knowledge of Kafka internals: partitions, replication, retention/compaction, rebalance strategies.

· Hands-on with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker/Confluent Replicator.

· Strong Linux fundamentals; networking (TCP, DNS, load balancing), and performance analysis.

· Proficiency in automation/scripting.

· Monitoring/observability: Data Dog, Grafana, JMX exporters, and log aggregation.

· Experience with DR, multi-region design, and incident management.

· Proven ability to produce clear, comprehensive documentation

Preferred Qualifications

· Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK operations and integration.

· Experience executing hardware refreshes mor major cluster rebuilds/migrations with minimal downtime.

The position is based in St. Louis or Denver, CO and one of the interview rounds will be conducted in person.