Principal Kafka Engineer

Please do not share febricated GC

Visa- gc and usc

Title- Principal Kafka Engineer

Location- LOCALS ONLY Cincinnati, Ohio

Duration-6 Month contract

Interview- onsite

Job Summary

We are seeking a Principal Kafka Engineer to lead the management, scaling, and optimization of our enterprise event-streaming ecosystem. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in Apache/Confluent Kafka, applies object-oriented programming principles to advanced automation, and leverages ITSM practices to deliver reliable, high-quality service across production environments.

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Key Responsibilities

• Kafka Platform Administration: Deploy, configure, and maintain highly available Kafka clusters across on-premises and cloud environments (Azure and GCP). Manage topics, partitions, and replication strategy to guarantee platform resiliency.

• OOP-Based Development & Automation: Design and build reusable frameworks, automation tools, and APIs using Java to streamline cluster provisioning, monitoring, and self-service developer onboarding.

• ITSM & Incident Management: Manage the platform lifecycle using ITSM processes (incident, problem, change management) to minimize service downtime and ensure strict SLA compliance.

• Security & Vulnerability Mitigation: Implement and enforce security controls, authentication mechanisms, and continuous vulnerability management across streaming infrastructure.

• Performance Tuning & Observability: Monitor cluster health and performance using dynaTrace, Prometheus, and Grafana. Execute capacity planning and performance tuning for high-throughput, low-latency data pipelines.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with DevOps and application teams to deliver architectural guidance on event-driven patterns, producer/consumer optimization, and enterprise integration.

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Required Qualifications****Experience

• 10+ years in software development or systems engineering.

• 3–5+ years of hands-on Apache Kafka administration experience in enterprise production environments.

Technical Stack & Skills

• Kafka Ecosystem: Deep expertise in Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform, including Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Avro, and KSQL.

• Cluster Management: Proficient with Zookeeper and KRaft architectures.

• Programming: Advanced Object-Oriented Programming in Java (with Spring Boot); working capability in Go or Python.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Hands-on experience with Terraform, Ansible, or Salt.

• Architecture & Design: Mastery of software design patterns, Domain-Driven Design (DDD), Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), and maintaining architectural documentation.

• Containers & Orchestration: Proficient with Docker and Kubernetes.

• DevOps & CI/CD: Expertise in GitHub Actions and automated deployment pipelines.

• Observability: Hands-on experience with dynaTrace, telemetry, and APM tools.

• Infrastructure: Solid understanding of networking, storage, virtualization, and cloud infrastructure architectures.

• Production Operations: Proven capability supporting Highly Available, Low-Latency enterprise production applications across globally distributed teams.

• Methodologies: Strong foundation in ITSM/ITIL frameworks and Agile practices.

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Desired Qualifications (Negotiable / Plus)

• Front-end development experience with Angular, React (preferred), or TypeScript frameworks.

• Familiarity with FinOps practices and cloud cost optimization.

• Prior experience working within dedicated platform/enablement engineering teams.

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Preferred Certifications

• Confluent Certified Administrator for Apache Kafka (CCAAK)

• Cloud Architecture Certifications (e.g., Azure Certified Solutions Architect)

• TOGAF