Software Engineer

Kforce has a client that is seeking a Software Engineer in Maryland Heights, MO. Summary: We're looking for a Senior Kafka Platform Engineer to join a team supporting a large-scale streaming technology environment. This role is focused on the administration, reliability, and ongoing modernization of enterprise Kafka infrastructure. You'll work closely with platform engineers, SREs, application teams, and engineering leadership to keep the Kafka environment healthy, troubleshoot production issues, and support the transition to AWS. Duties:

• Administer and support large-scale Kafka clusters in production
• Troubleshoot cluster health, replication, partitions, consumer lag, and performance issues
• Manage topics, partitions, replication, retention, quotas, ACLs, and consumer groups
• Support production incidents, root-cause analysis, and reliability improvements
• Help migrate and modernize Kafka environments in AWS
• Support Kafka infrastructure automation and deployments
• Monitor Kafka performance, broker health, consumer lag, and overall platform reliability
• Partner with application teams to troubleshoot producer/consumer issues
• Contribute to documentation, runbooks, and operational best practices
• 4+ years of hands-on Kafka administration in production
• Experience managing large Kafka environments, ideally 20+ brokers/nodes
• Strong understanding of Kafka fundamentals including partitions and replication; ISR and under-replicated partitions; Offsets and consumer lag; Consumer groups; Cluster health and performance
• Strong Linux and command-line experience
• Experience troubleshooting real-world Kafka production issues
• AWS experience
• Strong communication and collaboration skills

* AWS MSK

• Confluent Platform or Cloudera Kafka
• GitLab CI/CD
• Datadog
• Kafka migration experience
• MirrorMaker 2, Confluent Replicator, or Cluster Linking