Kafka Engineer / Administrator

Kafka Engineer / Administrator

Location: St. Louis, MO or Denver, CO – Hybrid
Duration: Long Term Contract
Rate: $50/hr on C2C

Job Description

We are looking for a hands-on Kafka Engineer / Administrator to support and manage enterprise Kafka environments across Cloudera, Confluent, and AWS MSK. The team is currently migrating Kafka workloads from on-premises environments to AWS MSK.

Required Skills

• 4+ years of hands-on Apache Kafka Administration
• Strong experience with Kafka clusters, brokers, topics, partitions, replication, ISR, offsets, and consumer groups
• Experience with Cloudera Kafka and/or Confluent Platform
• Hands-on AWS MSK experience preferred
• Strong Terraform / Infrastructure as Code experience
• Strong GitLab and GitLab CI/CD experience
• Strong Linux, Bash, Python, and scripting skills
• Experience with Kafka production support, incident management, troubleshooting, and RCA
• Strong understanding of consumer lag, under-replicated partitions, broker issues, partition balancing, and cluster health
• Experience with Kafka ACLs, security, TLS/SSL, SASL, IAM, RBAC, and encryption
• AWS knowledge including VPC, Security Groups, IAM, KMS, CloudWatch, and networking
• Experience with Datadog monitoring, dashboards, and alerting
• Experience with CI/CD, Git, automation, and configuration management
• Strong communication and collaboration skills

Nice to Have

• MirrorMaker 2
• Confluent Replicator
• Kafka Cluster Linking
• Kafka Connect
• Schema Registry
• ksqlDB
• Kafka Streams / Flink
• Kubernetes / EKS / Strimzi
• Confluent or AWS certifications
• Experience with Kafka migration from on-prem to AWS

Key Responsibilities

• Administer and support Kafka clusters across Cloudera, Confluent, and AWS MSK
• Troubleshoot Kafka cluster, broker, partition, replication, and consumer issues
• Monitor consumer lag, ISR, throughput, JVM, and cluster health
• Build and maintain Kafka/MSK infrastructure using Terraform
• Maintain GitLab CI/CD pipelines and automation
• Manage topics, partitions, replication, ACLs, quotas, and consumer groups
• Support Kafka workload migration to AWS MSK
• Configure Kafka security and access controls
• Create and maintain Datadog dashboards and alerts
• Participate in production support, incident response, RCA, upgrades, and capacity planning
• Work closely with producer and consumer application teams

Local candidates are preferred. Candidates willing to relocate to St. Louis or Denver may also be considered.