Kafka Engineer / Administrator

Role : Jr Kafka Engineer / Administrator
Location : Denver, Colorado (Onsite)
Open for C2C
OPT EAD is also accepted

Key Responsibilities:
• Design, deploy, configure, upgrade, and maintain highly available, scalable Apache
Kafka and Confluent Platform clusters for real-time data processing across production
and non-production environments.
• Monitor platform health, broker performance, replication, partition balance, throughput,
storage utilization, consumer lag, and connector status; troubleshoot incidents and tune
the platform for reliability, performance, and minimal downtime.
• Build and support Kafka topics, partitions, replication policies, schemas, service
accounts, and Kafka Connect integrations, including connectors for Amazon S3, Trino,
and OpenSearch; assist application and data teams with producer and consumer
integration.
• Implement and maintain platform security and compliance controls, including TLS
encryption, SASL authentication, access control lists, role-based access control, secrets
management, auditability, and secure certificate lifecycle practices.
• Automate cluster provisioning, configuration, scaling, upgrades, patching, and
operational tasks using Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD pipelines, and Python or shell
scripting.
• Plan and test backup, recovery, failover, cross-cluster replication, and disaster recovery
procedures to support defined service-level objectives and business continuity
requirements.
• Participate in production support and on-call rotation, lead technical troubleshooting,
document root cause analyses, and coordinate resolution with application teams,
infrastructure teams, incident managers, vendors, and cloud support personnel.
• Provide technical guidance on Kafka architecture and operational best practices;
maintain runbooks, standards, diagrams, capacity plans, and support documentation;
and remain current with Apache Kafka and Confluent capabilities.

Required Qualifications:
• 3+ years of hands-on experience administering enterprise Apache Kafka or Confluent
Platform environments, including production cluster design, capacity planning,
upgrades, patching, performance tuning, and lifecycle management.
• 3+ years of experience troubleshooting complex Kafka issues involving broker
availability, replication, partitioning, rebalance behavior, consumer lag, throughput,
latency, storage, and Kafka Connect task failures.
• 3+ years of experience automating infrastructure and platform operations with Terraform
and Ansible, supported by Git-based CI/CD pipelines and Python or shell scripting.
• Demonstrated experience designing and supporting highly available Kafka
architectures, including cross-cluster replication, failover, backup, recovery, and disaster
recovery testing.
• Deep understanding of Kafka security and governance, including TLS, SASL, ACLs,
RBAC, Schema Registry compatibility, service accounts, credential management, and
audit controls.
• Experience designing and operating observability capabilities using Prometheus,
Grafana, Confluent Control Center, OpenSearch, or equivalent solutions, including
actionable dashboards and alert thresholds.
• Proven ability to define engineering standards, advise application teams on producer
and consumer patterns, review platform designs, and lead technical resolution across
multiple teams.
• Proven excellence in client-facing communication, technical documentation, incident
leadership, root cause analysis, and consulting skills in English.
• Ability to work in office, participate in an on-call rotation, and collaborate with senior
client resources and vendor support teams.

Preferred Qualifications:
• Experience with Confluent Platform or Confluent Cloud components such as Food and Beverage or
ZooKeeper, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Control Center, Cluster Linking, and
stream-processing capabilities.
• Experience operating Kafka on AWS, Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, or another cloud
or container platform; AWS Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)
experience is beneficial.
• Experience with GitLab, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Argo CD, or comparable CI/CD and
GitOps tooling.
• Experience integrating Kafka with Amazon S3, Trino, OpenSearch, relational databases,
IBM MQ, data warehouses, or other enterprise source and sink systems.
• Familiarity with data governance, schema evolution, topic naming and retention
standards, capacity forecasting, service-level objectives, and platform cost optimization.
• Relevant certification or formal training in Apache Kafka, Confluent, AWS, Kubernetes,
Terraform, Ansible, or related technologies