Kafka Engineer/Administrator

Job Title: Kafka Engineer/Administrator

Location : Englewood, CO (near Fiddler's Green Circle, Denver metro) / Maryland Heights, MO (Riverport Dr, St. Louis metro) - Onsite

Duration:: 6+ months

Interview: Virtual

Skills Required:

• This is a hands-on platform admin role for self-managed Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform.
• Candidates who have only used Kafka as developers, or only worked with managed Amazon MSK, will not be considered.
• Must have (3+ years each):
• Production administration of enterprise Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform: cluster design, capacity planning, upgrades, patching, performance tuning
• Troubleshooting broker availability, replication, partitioning, rebalances, consumer lag, throughput/latency, and Kafka Connect task failures
• Automating platform operations with Terraform and Ansible, Git-based CI/CD, and Python or shell scripting
• Designing and supporting HA Kafka architectures: cross-cluster replication, failover, backup/recovery, DR testing
• Kafka security and governance: TLS, SASL, ACLs, RBAC, Schema Registry, service accounts, audit controls
• Observability with Prometheus, Grafana, Confluent Control Center, or OpenSearch
• Strong client-facing communication, incident leadership, RCA, and documentation
• Able to work onsite and join an on-call rotation
• Confluent components: KRaft, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Control Center, Cluster Linking
• Kafka on AWS, Kubernetes, or OpenShift; Amazon MSK
• GitLab, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or Argo CD
• Connect integrations to S3, Trino, OpenSearch, relational DBs, IBM MQ
• Kafka, Confluent, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, or Ansible certifications