We are looking for one Onshore Kafka Expert Consultant in Austin with 10+ Years Experience who can serve as a senior technical authority supporting our client onprem and cloudbased Confluent Kafka platforms. This role provides architecture leadership, platform engineering expertise, operational excellence, and advisory support to ensure secure, scalable, and resilient eventstreaming capabilities across the enterprise. Below are the key responsibilities:
Kafka Architecture & Platform Engineering
- Design, implement, and support enterprisegrade Confluent Kafka architectures across onprem and cloud environments.
- Lead capacity planning, installation, configuration, administration, and lifecycle management of Kafka platforms.
- Provide deep expertise in Kafka internals, clustering, distributed systems, networking, and performance tuning.
Security, Reliability & Resilience
- Design and implement secure Kafka architectures, including authentication, authorization, encryption, and network isolation.
- Define and support high availability, disaster recovery, and data replication strategies.
- Ensure alignment with enterprise security, compliance, and governance standards.
Data Streaming & Integration
- Advise on data ingestion, event streaming, batch and stream processing architectures.
- Provide guidance on data modeling and serialization standards (Avro, Protobuf, JSON Schema).
- Support enterprise integration use cases and resolve complex Kafkarelated integration challenges.
Automation & DevOps Enablement
- Drive automationfirst operations using Python, Ansible, and scripting.
- Build and maintain selfservice operational tools to reduce daytoday support overhead.
- Integrate Kafka platform operations with DevOps and CI/CD tooling (e.g., Azure, Jenkins, Puppet, Chef).
Incident Management & Problem Resolution
- Lead deepdive investigations into complex production issues and outages.
- Perform root cause analysis, document findings, and drive remediation to closure.
- Operate effectively in highpressure outage and incident management scenarios.
Advisory & Stakeholder Engagement
- Act as a trusted technical advisor to Schwab engineering, operations, and leadership teams.
- Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
- Demonstrate strong customer focus, ownership, and onshore engagement.
- Collaborate effectively with crossfunctional teams and vendors.
Required Experience & Skills
- 10+ years of experience in distributed systems, messaging, and enterprise platform engineering.
- Extensive handson experience with Confluent Kafka Platform (onprem and cloud).
- Strong background in Linux/Unix environments, networking, OS performance, and security.
- Proven experience with automation, DevOps, and operational tooling.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Strong organizational, relationship management, and teamwork skills.
Preferred Qualifications
- Confluent Kafka and/or Cloud certifications.
- Prior experience supporting largescale, regulated enterprise environments.
Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.
- Relevant certifications in Apache Kafka or cloud technologies are advantageous.
- Proven track record of leading technical teams and delivering successful projects.
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