Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator - Denver, CO , St. Louis, MO

Job Title: Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator 
Location: Denver, CO or St. Louis, MO 
Duration: 12 Months
No C2C only W2

Job Description:
We are migrating a portfolio of Apache Kafka clusters from on-premises platforms (Cloudera and Confluent) to AWS MSK, managed through a CI/CD pipeline built on Terraform and GitLab.
We are looking for a senior, hands-on Kafka engineer to own day-to-day Kafka administration across both environments, drive the migration, and coordinate closely with producer and consumer application teams to ensure a smooth, low-risk cutover.
This is a senior individual-contributor role for someone who has run Kafka at scale in production, is comfortable in a hybrid on-prem/cloud world, and can act as the technical point of contact between platform and application teams.

Required Skills:
•    Hands-on administration experience with Cloudera and Confluent Platforms.
•    Production experience with AWS MSK (provisioning, configuration, IAM authentication, networking).
•    Proven experience migrating Kafka workloads to the cloud with minimal disruption.
•    Strong Terraform and GitLab CI/CD experience for infrastructure automation.
•    Hands-on Datadog experience for monitoring, dashboards, and alerting.
•    Deep understanding of Kafka internals: partitions, replication, ISR, offsets, consumer groups, and delivery semantics.
•    Solid AWS fundamentals: VPC, security groups, IAM, KMS, CloudWatch, Private Link.
•    Strong Linux, networking, and scripting skills (Bash, Python).
•    Excellent communication and coordination skills to work across producer/consumer teams.