Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator

Description:
Hybrid 4 onsite in Maryland Heights, MO
Our client seeks a Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator to support and administer Kafka platforms across on-premises Cloudera and Confluent environments and AWS MSK. The role will operate Kafka in production, drive reliability, and partner with producer and consumer teams. The engineer will maintain Terraform infrastructure and GitLab CI/CD pipelines, enhance observability with Datadog, and contribute to ongoing modernization and workload transitions to AWS MSK.
We can facilitate w2 and corp-to-corp consultants. For our w2 consultants, we offer a great benefits package that includes Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits, 401k with company matching, and life insurance.
Rate: $60.00 to $70.00/hr. w2
Responsibilities:

• Administer and operate Kafka clusters across Cloudera, Confluent Platform, and AWS MSK.
• Provide daily operational support including incident response, on-call participation, root-cause analysis, and reliability improvements.
• Manage topics, partitions, replication, retention, quotas, ACLs, and consumer groups.
• Tune brokers, producers, and consumers for throughput, latency, and reliability.
• Handle patching, upgrades, capacity planning, and performance troubleshooting.
• Configure and maintain security including TLS/SSL, SASL, mTLS, IAM for MSK, RBAC/ACLs, and encryption at rest and in transit.
• Partner on migration and modernization efforts from on-prem to AWS MSK using mechanisms such as MirrorMaker 2, Confluent Replicator, or cluster linking.
• Validate topic parity, offsets, throughput, and data integrity before and after transitions, and help define rollback and dry-run plans.
• Build and maintain Kafka/MSK infrastructure with Terraform and manage deployments via GitLab CI/CD with GitOps practices.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and dashboards in Datadog for broker metrics, consumer lag, partition health, JVM, and throughput.
• Coordinate with producer and consumer teams on client configuration, schema management, partitioning, idempotence, and delivery semantics.
• Document runbooks, share knowledge, and support a collaborative team culture.

Experience Requirements:

• 5+ years in data, platform, or infrastructure engineering with 4+ years operating Apache Kafka in production.
• Hands-on administration with Cloudera and Confluent Platform.
• Production experience with AWS MSK including provisioning, configuration, IAM, and networking.
• Strong Terraform and GitLab CI/CD experience for infrastructure automation.
• Hands-on Datadog experience for monitoring, dashboards, and alerting.
• Deep understanding of Kafka internals including partitions, replication, ISR, offsets, consumer groups, and delivery semantics.
• Solid AWS fundamentals including VPC, security groups, IAM, KMS, CloudWatch, and PrivateLink.
• Strong Linux, networking, and scripting skills in Bash and Python.
• Effective communication and collaboration skills.
• Preferred: experience with MirrorMaker 2, Confluent Replicator, or cluster linking, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, ksqlDB, Kafka Streams or Flink, Kubernetes or EKS, relevant certifications, and large enterprise or regulated environments.

Recruitment Transparency Notice

Eliassen Group values transparency in our recruitment practices. Please be advised that Eliassen Group utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) tools as part of its initial application screening and hiring process. You may receive email and SMS notifications from the Eliassen Virtual Recruiting Team (, ) inviting you to complete a brief voice screening as part of your application process. These tools assist our hiring teams in different ways, including but not limited to, assistance in reviewing application materials to help identify candidates whose qualifications most closely match the requirements of the position. All AI-assisted evaluations and responses are reviewed by human recruiters before any hiring decisions are made. The use of AI in our process is intended to support fairness, efficiency, and consistency, and Eliassen Group takes measures to prevent bias or discrimination in connection with its hiring practices. By proceeding, you acknowledge, agree, and consent to Eliassen Group's use of these tools, including AI tools, as part of the application and hiring process.
Skills, experience, and other compensable factors will be considered when determining pay rate. The pay range provided in this posting reflects a W2 hourly rate; other employment options may be available that may result in pay outside of the provided range.
W2 employees of Eliassen Group who are regularly scheduled to work 30 or more hours per week are eligible for the following benefits: medical (choice of 3 plans), dental, vision, pre-tax accounts, other voluntary benefits including life and disability insurance, 401(k) with match, and sick time if required by law in the worked-in state/locality.
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About Eliassen Group:
Eliassen Group is a strategic consulting firm that helps organizations reach further and achieve more through our technology, business advisory, and life sciences solutions. For nearly 40 years, we have combined exceptional people, deep domain expertise, and intelligent capabilities to expand our clients' capacity and accelerate meaningful outcomes. We are driven by a purpose to positively impact the lives of our employees, clients, consultants, and the communities we serve.
Eliassen is committed to building a diverse and inclusive team from a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We are an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer and all employment decisions are based on merit, performance, and business needs. Eliassen does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, gender identity or expression, sexual preference or orientation, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), marital status, creed, religion, physical or mental disability, genetic information, military or veteran status, age, ancestry, national origin, citizenship status, prohibited criminal record inquiries of applicants and employees, or any other category protected by federal, state, or local laws.
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