Kafka Admin

Job Title: Kafka Admin
Location: Philadelphia, PA

Key Responsibilities:

• Implement secure Kafka/Confluent platforms with SSL/TLS and RBAC-based access control.
• Design highly available, scalable architectures with disaster recovery aligned to RPO/RTO.
• Establish monitoring and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic) to ensure platform reliability and operational excellence.
• Optimize performance, conduct capacity planning, and troubleshoot complex production issues.
• Implement and manage enterprise data connectors (Oracle CDC, ADLS2 Sink), ensuring reliable data integration.
• Develop and support streaming applications using Apache Flink and Kafka Streams.
• Automate infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps, Git, Terraform, and Ansible.
• Support cost tracking and chargeback/showback reporting for Kafka usage.

Required skills:

• 5+ years of hands-on experience with Kafka/Confluent in production.
• Strong expertise with:
• SSL/TLS end-to-end configuration in Kafka ecosystems
• RBAC authorization configuration and operational administration
• Designing for HA/redundancy and scaling for growth
• Monitoring/alerting with Prometheus & Grafana, plus operational tooling such as New Relic
• Performance testing and tuning (producers/consumers, brokers, Connect, infrastructure)
• Demonstrated experience implementing:
• Confluent Oracle Premium CDC Connector
• Confluent sink to ADLS Gen2 (ADLS2)
• Proficiency with Azure DevOps, Git, and building CI/CD pipelines.
• Working knowledge of Apache Flink and hands-on experience writing Kafka Streams.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience implementing and testing Kafka DR cluster architectures and operational runbooks.
• Familiarity with enterprise governance patterns (multi-tenancy, naming standards, quotas, schema governance).
• Experience defining usage metering to enable reliable chargeback/showback.

Additional Expectations

• Proficiency with using Linux CLI (preferably RHEL/SLES).
• Ability to participate in an on-call rotation and provide timely incident support (if required).
• Strong documentation and stakeholder communication skills across engineering, operations, and product teams.
• Ability to create design patterns/templates, provide development support and conduct knowledge transfer sessions for onboarding new use cases and modernizing existing ones.