Kafka Administrator

We have an exciting contract opportunity for Kafka Administrator with the following details:

Job Title: Kafka Administrator
Duration: 9 12 Months
Position Type: Contract
Location: Denver CO

The key skills we should focus on are: Strong Terraform experience CI/CD expertise (any major toolset/platform is fine) Kafka experience any flavor, preferably with Confluent and Amazon MSK

Key Responsibilities:

Kafka Administration

Deploy, configure, and manage Apache Kafka clusters and AWS MSK environments.

Monitor broker health, partitions, replication factors, and consumer lag.

Perform capacity planning and cluster scaling activities.

Manage Kafka security using SSL, SASL, ACLs, and encryption standards.

Troubleshoot producer, consumer, and broker performance issues.

Support Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Cruise Control, and MirrorMaker implementations.

AWS Cloud Administration

Manage cloud infrastructure services including EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, EBS, CloudWatch, CloudTrail and AWS Glue.

Support AWS Managed Streaming for Kafka (MSK), EMR, Lambda, and Airflow environments.

Implement cloud security best practices and governance controls.

Perform infrastructure provisioning and automation using Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

Monitor cloud resource utilization and optimize operational costs.

DevOps & Automation

Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar tools.

Automate infrastructure deployment using Terraform, CloudFormation, and Ansible.

Manage source control repositories and release processes.

Implement monitoring and alerting solutions using Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, ELK, or CloudWatch.

Support containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.

Develop automation scripts using Python, Shell, or Bash.

Operations & Support

Provide Level 2 and Level 3 production support.

Participate in on-call support rotations and incident management activities.

Perform root cause analysis (RCA) and implement preventive measures.

Create and maintain operational documentation and standard operating procedures.

Ensure compliance with security, audit, and regulatory requirements.

Required Skills

Apache Kafka Administration

AWS Cloud Services

Linux (RHEL/Rocky Linux)

Shell Scripting and Python

Jenkins, Git, Ansible, Terraform

Docker and Kubernetes

Monitoring Tools (Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk)

Networking, Security, and High Availability Concepts

Performance Tuning and Capacity Planning

Preferred Qualifications

Bachelor s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.

Experience with Cloudera CDP, AWS MSK, Airflow, and Spark.

AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Kafka, or Kubernetes certifications.

Experience supporting large-scale production environments handling petabyte-scale data workloads.

Key Achievements Expected

Maintain platform availability above 99.9%.

Adopt AI-assisted engineering practices to improve operational efficiency, reduce manual effort, and accelerate troubleshooting and documentation.

Automate repetitive operational tasks.

Improve cluster performance and resource utilization.

Ensure secure, scalable, and reliable data platform operations.

Support enterprise data engineering, analytics, and AI/ML workloads efficiently.