Kafka Engineer / Administrator

Kafka Engineer / Administrator, Denver, Colorado (Onsite)
Key Responsibilities:
Design, deploy, configure, upgrade, and maintain highly available, scalable Apache
Kafka and Confluent Platform clusters for real-time data processing across production and non-production environments. Monitor platform health, broker performance, replication, partition balance, throughput, storage utilization, consumer lag, and connector status; troubleshoot incidents and tune the platform for reliability, performance, and minimal downtime.

Build and support Kafka topics, partitions, replication policies, schemas, service accounts, and Kafka Connect integrations, including connectors for Amazon S3, Trino, and OpenSearch; assist application and data teams with producer and consumer integration. Implement and maintain platform security and compliance controls, including TLS encryption, SASL authentication, access control lists, role-based access control, secrets management, auditability, and secure certificate lifecycle practices.

Automate cluster provisioning, configuration, scaling, upgrades, patching, and operational tasks using Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD pipelines, and Python or shell scripting. Plan and test backup, recovery, failover, cross-cluster replication, and disaster recovery procedures to support defined service-level objectives and business continuity requirements. Participate in production support and on-call rotation, lead technical troubleshooting, document root cause analyses, and coordinate resolution with application teams, infrastructure teams, incident managers, vendors, and cloud support personnel.

Provide technical guidance on Kafka architecture and operational best practices; maintain runbooks, standards, diagrams, capacity plans, and support documentation; and remain current with Apache Kafka and Confluent capabilities.

Required Qualifications

3+ years of hands-on experience administering enterprise Apache Kafka or Confluent
Platform environments, including production cluster design, capacity planning, upgrades, patching, performance tuning, and lifecycle management.
3+ years of experience troubleshooting complex Kafka issues involving broker availability, replication, partitioning, rebalance behavior, consumer lag, throughput, latency, storage, and Kafka Connect task failures.
3+ years of experience automating infrastructure and platform operations with Terraform and Ansible, supported by Git-based CI/CD pipelines and Python or shell scripting.

Demonstrated experience designing and supporting highly available Kafka architectures, including cross-cluster replication, failover, backup, recovery, and disaster recovery testing. Deep understanding of Kafka security and governance, including TLS, SASL, ACLs,
RBAC, Schema Registry compatibility, service accounts, credential management, and audit controls. Experience designing and operating observability capabilities using Prometheus,
Grafana, Confluent Control Center, OpenSearch, or equivalent solutions, including actionable dashboards and alert thresholds.

Proven ability to define engineering standards, advise application teams on producer and consumer patterns, review platform designs, and lead technical resolution across multiple teams. Proven excellence in client-facing communication, technical documentation, incident leadership, root cause analysis, and consulting skills in English. Ability to work in office, participate in an on-call rotation, and collaborate with senior client resources and vendor support teams.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with Confluent Platform or Confluent Cloud components such as KRaft or
ZooKeeper, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Control Center, Cluster Linking, and stream-processing capabilities. Experience operating Kafka on AWS, Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, or another cloud or container platform; AWS Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) experience is beneficial. Experience with GitLab, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Argo CD, or comparable CI/CD and
GitOps tooling.

Experience integrating Kafka with Amazon S3, Trino, OpenSearch, relational databases,
IBM MQ, data warehouses, or other enterprise source and sink systems. Familiarity with data governance, schema evolution, topic naming and retention standards, capacity forecasting, service-level objectives, and platform cost optimization. Relevant certification or formal training in Apache Kafka, Confluent, AWS, Kubernetes,
Terraform, Ansible, or related technologies.