Kafka Administrator

Job Title: Senior Kafka Administrator
Location: Denver, CO or St. Louis, MO
Work Arrangement: Onsite position 
Job Type: Contract
Interview : 1st round Video Interview & Final round Face to face interview Mandatory 
Duration: Long-Term Contract
 

Job Summary
We are seeking a Senior Kafka Administrator / Confluent Administrator to own and evolve an on-premises event streaming platform, with a primary focus on the Confluent Platform. 
The ideal candidate will lead planning and execution of hardware refreshes for on-premises Kafka clusters while driving reliability, performance, automation, observability, and operational excellence.
Key Responsibilities
Design, deploy, configure, and operate highly available Kafka clusters across on-premises, cloud, and managed environments.
Administer Confluent Platform and core Kafka components.
Manage topics, partitions, replication, quotas, retention policies, and consumer groups.
Plan and execute Kafka upgrades, patches, migrations, and cluster rebuilds.
Manage and support Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Mirror Maker/Confluent Replicator, and REST Proxy.
Troubleshoot Kafka cluster issues, broker failures, replication problems, consumer lag, and performance bottlenecks.
Perform Kafka performance tuning across producers, consumers, batching, compression, acknowledgments, ISR, and controller health.
Conduct throughput testing, benchmarking, and capacity planning.
Develop partitioning strategies and perform cluster right-sizing.
Implement automation for provisioning, deployment, configuration management, monitoring, and incident response.
Monitor Kafka environments using Datadog, Grafana, JMX Exporter, and centralized log aggregation.
Required Skills & Experience
5+ years of experience in Systems Engineering, Platform Engineering, SRE, or DevOps.
4+ years of hands-on production experience administering Apache Kafka at scale.
Strong expertise in Confluent Platform and Kafka administration.
Deep understanding of Kafka internals, including:
Topics and partitions
Replication
ISR
Retention and log compaction
Consumer groups
Rebalancing strategies
Broker and controller health
Hands-on experience with:
Kafka Connect
Schema Registry
Mirror Maker / Confluent Replicator
REST Proxy
Strong Linux administration and troubleshooting skills.
Strong understanding of networking concepts including TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing, and network troubleshooting.
Experience with performance analysis, capacity planning, and Kafka cluster optimization.
Strong automation and scripting skills using technologies such as Python, Shell scripting, or similar.
Experience with observability and monitoring tools such as:
Datadog
Grafana
JMX Exporter
Centralized logging platforms
Experience with disaster recovery, multi-region architecture, backup/restore, and incident management.
Proven ability to create clear and comprehensive technical documentation, runbooks, and operational procedures.

Preferred Qualifications
Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK operations and integration.
Experience executing hardware refreshes mor major cluster rebuilds/migrations with minimal downtime.

Drop your resumes at