Kafka Admin

Job Description

Job Title : Senior Big Data / Hadoop / Kafka / DevOps Administrator

Location: Denver, CO | St. Louis, MO also accepted. In-person interview is mandatory at the selected work location.

The key skills we should focus on are:

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• Strong Terraform experience
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• CI/CD expertise (any major toolset/platform is fine)
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• Kafka experience any flavor, preferably with Confluent and Amazon MSK
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Key Responsibilities:

Kafka Administration

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• Deploy, configure, and manage Apache Kafka clusters and AWS MSK
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• environments.
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• Monitor broker health, partitions, replication factors, and consumer lag.
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• Perform capacity planning and cluster scaling activities.
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• Manage Kafka security using SSL, SASL, ACLs, and encryption standards.
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• Troubleshoot producer, consumer, and broker performance issues.
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• Support Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Cruise Control, and MirrorMaker
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• implementations.
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AWS Cloud Administration

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• Manage cloud infrastructure services including EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, EBS,
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• CloudWatch, CloudTrail and AWS Glue.
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• Support AWS Managed Streaming for Kafka (MSK), EMR, Lambda, and Airflow
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• environments.
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• Implement cloud security best practices and governance controls.
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• Perform infrastructure provisioning and automation using Infrastructure as Code
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• (IaC).
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• Monitor cloud resource utilization and optimize operational costs.
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• DevOps & Automation
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• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI,
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• or similar tools.
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• Automate infrastructure deployment using Terraform, CloudFormation, and
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• Ansible.
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• Manage source control repositories and release processes.
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• Implement monitoring and alerting solutions using Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk,
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• ELK, or CloudWatch.
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• Support containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
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• Develop automation scripts using Python, Shell, or Bash.
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Operations & Support

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• Provide Level 2 and Level 3 production support.
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• Participate in on-call support rotations and incident management activities.
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• Perform root cause analysis (RCA) and implement preventive measures.
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• Create and maintain operational documentation and standard operating
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• procedures.
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• Ensure compliance with security, audit, and regulatory requirements.
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Required Skills

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• Apache Kafka Administration
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• AWS Cloud Services
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• Linux (RHEL/Rocky Linux)
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• Shell Scripting and Python
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• Jenkins, Git, Ansible, Terraform
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• Docker and Kubernetes
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• Monitoring Tools (Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk)
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• Networking, Security, and High Availability Concepts
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• Performance Tuning and Capacity Planning
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Preferred Qualifications

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• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
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• Experience with Cloudera CDP, AWS MSK, Airflow, and Spark.
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• AWS, GCP, Kafka, or Kubernetes certifications.
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• Experience supporting large-scale production environments handling petabyte-
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• scale data workloads.
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Key Achievements Expected

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• Maintain platform availability above 99.9%.
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• Adopt AI-assisted engineering practices to improve operational efficiency,
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• reduce manual effort, and accelerate troubleshooting and documentation.
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• Automate repetitive operational tasks.
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• Improve cluster performance and resource utilization.
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• Ensure secure, scalable, and reliable data platform operations.
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• Support enterprise data engineering, analytics, and AI/ML workloads efficiently.
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