Confluent Kafka Admin

ITTConnect is seeking a senior  Confluent Kafka Administrator to work on site for a client in the Columbus, OH area. This is a contract position with a client that is a global leader in consulting, digital transformation, technology and engineering services with over 300,000 team members in nearly 50 countries. The end client is in the Utilities sector.

Job location : Columbus, OH (on site work)

We are seeking a hands-on Confluent Kafka Administrator to engineer, administer and support AEP’s enterprise Kafka platform. This is a platform administration and production-operations position—not a Java application-development role.

The administrator will be responsible for Kafka cluster lifecycle management, broker configuration, upgrades, security, performance, monitoring, capacity planning, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry and deployments on OpenShift/Kubernetes.

Key Responsibilities:

• Install, configure, administer, patch and upgrade Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform environments.


• Administer Kafka clusters, brokers, topics, partitions, replication factors, consumer groups, offsets, quotas and retention policies.


• Manage broker configurations, partition reassignment, replication, ISR health and cluster balancing.


• Perform capacity planning, performance tuning and resource optimization across production and non-production environments.


• Administer Kafka Connect distributed clusters, workers, tasks, connectors, offsets, error handling and dead-letter queues.


• Configure and administer Confluent Schema Registry, subjects, compatibility policies and schema lifecycle controls


• Deploy and operate Kafka platform components on OpenShift and Kubernetes.


• Manage platform configurations, secrets, certificates, ConfigMaps, persistent storage, resource limits and rolling deployments.


• Configure Kafka security using TLS/SSL, SASL, ACLs, RBAC, service accounts and certificate management.


• Monitor Kafka platform health using Prometheus, Grafana, Dynatrace and Splunk.


• Troubleshoot broker outages, consumer lag, under-replicated partitions, offline partitions, disk pressure, connector failures, authentication problems and performance degradation.


• Lead production incident response, root-cause analysis and permanent corrective actions.


• Support high availability, disaster recovery, backup and platform resilience requirements.


• Support CDC integrations involving Oracle GoldenGate and Debezium.


• Automate platform configuration and deployment using GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Helm and scripting.


• Create operational runbooks, platform standards, monitoring dashboards and reusable onboarding processes.


• Participate in production support, maintenance windows, platform upgrades and on-call activities as required.

Requirements

• Strong hands-on experience administering Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform in production.


• Demonstrated experience installing, configuring, upgrading and troubleshooting Kafka clusters.


• Strong knowledge of brokers, topics, partitions, replication, ISR, consumer groups, offsets, retention and cluster balancing.


• Hands-on administration of Kafka Connect and Confluent Schema Registry.


• Experience operating Kafka or Confluent components on OpenShift or Kubernetes.


• Strong Linux administration and troubleshooting skills.


• Experience configuring Kafka security using TLS, SASL, ACLs and RBAC.


• Experience monitoring Kafka using Prometheus, Grafana, Dynatrace and/or Splunk.


• Experience with GitHub, CI/CD automation and ArgoCD or comparable GitOps tooling.


• Ability to clearly explain production incidents, platform upgrades and administrative tasks personally performed.

Preferred Qualifications :

• Oracle GoldenGate or Debezium CDC experience.


• Confluent Control Center administration.


• Experience with Helm, Terraform or platform-automation scripting.


• Experience supporting Snowflake, Iceberg, AWS or Azure integrations.


• Familiarity with Java and Spring Boot Kafka applications for troubleshooting purposes.


• Experience supporting enterprise utility or other highly regulated production environments.

Important Screening Requirement :

• Candidates must have direct Kafka platform-administration experience. Candidates whose experience is primarily developing Java/Spring Boot producers, consumers or microservices will not qualify.

Candidates should be prepared to discuss :

• A Confluent cluster they personally installed or upgraded


• Cluster size, broker count and Confluent version


• Broker-level configurations they changed


• A serious Kafka production incident they resolved


• Partition reassignment, replication and ISR troubleshooting


• Kafka security configuration


• Kafka administration on OpenShift or Kubernetes