Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator
Location: Denver, CO or St. Louis, MO
Work Arrangement: Hybrid 4 days/week onsiteDuration: 52 WeeksStart Date: 10/12/2026Employment Type: ContractJob
DescriptionWe are seeking a Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator with strong hands-on experience managing Apache Kafka in production environments. The ideal candidate will have experience with both on-premises and cloud Kafka platforms and will support a large-scale Kafka migration to a managed cloud environment.ResponsibilitiesAdminister and support Apache Kafka clusters in production.Perform Kafka cluster migration from on-premises platforms to AWS MSK.Manage Kafka environments across on-premises and cloud platforms.Work with Cloudera and Confluent Kafka platforms.Support Kafka configuration, monitoring, troubleshooting, performance tuning, and upgrades.Develop and maintain CI/CD automation using Terraform and GitLab.Coordinate with producer and consumer application teams during migration and cutover activities.Troubleshoot Kafka connectivity, performance, replication, and availability issues.Ensure smooth and low-risk migration of Kafka workloads.Serve as a technical point of contact between Kafka platform and application teams.
Required Qualifications:
5+ years of experience in data, platform, infrastructure, or related engineering.4+ years of hands-on Apache Kafka production experience.Strong Kafka administration and troubleshooting experience.Hands-on experience with Cloudera and Confluent platforms.Experience working with AWS MSK or managed Kafka services.Experience with Terraform and GitLab CI/CD.Strong understanding of Kafka architecture, clusters, brokers, topics, partitions, replication, producers, and consumers.Experience supporting Kafka in large-scale production environments.Strong communication and collaboration skills.Preferred SkillsAWS cloud experienceKafka migration experienceInfrastructure as CodeCI/CD automationProduction platform administrationOn-premises to cloud migration experience
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