Kafka Administrator/Platform Engineer

Veteran Firm Seeking a Kafka Administrator/Platform Engineer for an Assignment in Remote, US

My name is Stephen Hrutka. I lead a Veteran-Owned management consulting firm in Washington, DC. We specialize in Technical and Cleared Recruiting for the Department of Defense (DoD), the Intelligence Community (IC), and other advanced defense agencies.

At HRUCKUS, we support fellow Veteran-Owned businesses by helping them recruit for positions across organizations such as the VA, SBA, HHS, DARPA, and other leading-edge R&D-focused defense agencies.

We seek to fill a Kafka Administrator Platform Engineer role in Remote, US

The ideal candidate is a US resident with strong hands-on experience administering Kafka platforms, AWS, event-driven architecture, and DevOps CI CD practices, along with a deep understanding of owning the Kafka control plane.

If you’re interested, I'll gladly provide more details about the role and further discuss your qualifications.

Thanks,

Stephen M Hrutka

Principal Consultant

Executive Summary: HRUCKUS is looking for an experienced Kafka Administrator Platform Engineer to support enterprise data streaming and integration initiatives, administer and enhance Kafka platforms, and ensure reliable data flow across systems and third-party partners.

Position Description: The ideal candidate has hands-on experience with true Kafka administration, AWS, Confluent Platform Confluent Cloud, event-driven architecture, and DevOps CI CD practices. In this collaborative Agile environment, engineers work closely with application teams to troubleshoot issues, improve platform capabilities, and develop new solutions. Crucially, this role is for a systems engineer who owns the Kafka control plane, designs and runs clusters end-to-end, manages broker instability, and operates security models—not just someone who builds Kafka Streams applications or uses Kafka as a dependency.

Position Responsibilities:

• Administer and support Kafka platforms across on-premises and cloud environments.
• Own the Kafka control plane and design and run clusters end-to-end (including capacity, partitions, replication, upgrades, and DR).
• Handle broker instability, unresponsiveness, ISR issues, rebalances, and disk pressure.
• Operate security models including RBAC ACLs, cert rotation, and authN authZ.
• Enforce platform governance, onboarding patterns, guardrails, and standards.
• Manage and support Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud environments.
• Provide production and client support for Kafka-based applications.
• Perform incident management, troubleshooting, and issue resolution, taking accountability for platform outages.
• Develop new services, platform enhancements, and automation.
• Design and engineer solutions for streaming and cloud environments.
• Develop Proofs-of-Concept (POCs) for new technologies and capabilities.
• Participate in code reviews and technical discussions.
• Collaborate with application and engineering teams to resolve complex issues.
• Coach and provide technical guidance to junior team members.
• Contribute to Agile Scrum ceremonies and team knowledge-sharing activities.
• Support monitoring, alerting, logging, and overall platform reliability.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or another related quantitative business field (equivalent practical experience may be considered in place of a degree).
• 4–6 years of related professional experience required.
• Apache Kafka Administration – Strong hands-on experience administering Kafka platforms.
• AWS – Experience working with AWS cloud services and cloud-based platforms.
• Event-Driven Architecture – Experience designing or supporting event-driven and event-streaming solutions.
• Confluent Platform/Confluent Cloud – Experience administering or supporting Confluent environments.
• DevOps/CI/CD – Experience with automation, deployment pipelines, and DevOps practices.
• Cloud Engineering – Experience supporting cloud-based infrastructure and services.
• Monitoring, Alerting & Logging – Experience with enterprise monitoring and logging tools.
• NoSQL Databases – Experience with NoSQL technologies.

Desired Qualifications:

• Dynatrace preferred.
• Splunk preferred.
• MongoDB preferred.
• CISSP certification is preferred.
• Experience developing automation and platform services.
• Experience with Proof-of-Concept development.

Details:

Job Title: Kafka Administrator Platform Engineer

Location: Remote, US

Salary Range: $99,640 - $109,040 annually