Kafka Admin

Job Title: Kafka Admin/ Engineer
Location: Denver, CO
Duration: Long Term

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, deploy, configure, upgrade, and maintain highly available Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform clusters across production and non-production environments.

• Monitor platform health, broker performance, partition balance, consumer lag, and connector status; tune the platform for reliability and minimal downtime.

• Build and support Kafka topics, partitions, replication policies, schemas, service accounts, and Kafka Connect integrations (Amazon S3, Trino, OpenSearch).

• Implement and maintain platform security controls, including TLS encryption, SASL authentication, ACLs, RBAC, secrets management, and certificate lifecycle practices.

• Automate cluster provisioning, configuration, upgrades, patching, and operational tasks using Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD pipelines, and Python or shell scripting.

• Plan and test backup, recovery, failover, cross-cluster replication, and disaster recovery procedures to support defined SLOs and business continuity requirements.

• Participate in production support and on-call rotation, lead troubleshooting, document root cause analyses, and coordinate resolution across teams.

• Provide technical guidance on Kafka architecture; maintain runbooks, standards, diagrams, capacity plans, and support documentation.

Required Qualifications:

• 3+ years of hands-on experience administering enterprise Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform environments, including cluster design, upgrades, patching, and tuning.

• 3+ years of experience troubleshooting complex Kafka issues involving broker availability, replication, consumer lag, throughput, latency, and connector failures.

• 3+ years of experience automating operations with Terraform and Ansible, supported by Git-based CI/CD pipelines and Python or shell scripting.

• Demonstrated experience designing and supporting highly available Kafka architectures, cross-cluster replication, failover, and disaster recovery testing.

• Deep understanding of Kafka security and governance, including TLS, SASL, ACLs, RBAC, Schema Registry compatibility, and audit controls.

• Experience operating observability capabilities using Prometheus, Grafana, Confluent Control Center, OpenSearch, or equivalent solutions.

• Proven ability to define engineering standards, advise application teams on producer/consumer patterns, and lead incident resolution across teams.

• Ability to work in office, participate in an on-call rotation, and collaborate with senior client resources and vendor support teams.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with Confluent components: KRaft/ZooKeeper, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Control Center, Cluster Linking, and stream-processing capabilities.

• Experience operating Kafka on AWS, Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, or Amazon MSK.

• Experience with GitLab, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Argo CD, or comparable CI/CD and GitOps tooling.

• Experience integrating Kafka with Amazon S3, Trino, OpenSearch, relational databases, IBM MQ, or enterprise data warehouses.

• Familiarity with data governance, schema evolution, topic retention standards, SLOs, and platform cost optimization.

• Relevant certification or training in Apache Kafka, Confluent, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, or Ansible.