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