LOCATION: Remote (must work EST hours and live within 60 miles of one of these offices)
Draper, UT
Columbus, OH
Plano, TX
Chadds Ford, PA
Wilmington, DE
NYC (Manhattan)
Working Hours: 9–5 EST Type: Temp to Perm Top 3 Must-Haves (Hard and/or Soft Skills) 1. Kafka & Confluent Cloud Expertise
Deep understanding of Kafka architecture and Confluent Cloud services.
Experience with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and stream processing.
2. AWS Infrastructure & Database Management
Hands-on experience with AWS services like RDS, Aurora, EC2, IAM, and networking.
Ability to integrate Kafka with AWS-hosted databases and troubleshoot cloud-native issues.
3. Terraform & Infrastructure Automation
Proficiency in Terraform for provisioning Kafka clusters, AWS resources, and managing infrastructure as code.
Familiarity with GitOps workflows and CI/CD pipelines.
Top 3 Nice-to-Haves
Monitoring & Observability
Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or Confluent Metrics API.
Ability to set up alerting and dashboards for Kafka and cloud services.
Security & Governance
Knowledge of RBAC, encryption, and audit logging in Confluent Cloud and AWS.
Experience implementing secure data pipelines and compliance controls.
Collaboration & Incident Response
Strong cross-functional teamwork with data engineers, SREs, and developers.
Skilled in communication during outages, postmortems, and planning sessions.
Certification Preferences
Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka
AWS Certified Solutions Architect –Associate
HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate
Role Summary The Kafka Platform Engineer designs, implements, and supports scalable, secure Kafka-based messaging pipelines that power real-time communication between critical systems such as credit, loan applications, and fraud services. This role focuses on resiliency, reliability, and operations of the Kafka platform in a highly regulated environment, partnering closely with engineering and platform teams to support the migration from on-prem to AWS. Essential Job Functions
Monitor and optimize cloud services;manage access controls;maintain compliance records. (25%)
Write and maintain automated deployment scripts;ensure CI/CD pipeline integrity. (25%)
Set up observability tools;create dashboards and alerts;provide performance reports. (20%)
Collaborate cross-functionally, document requirements, resolve conflicts, and track progress. (15%)
Conduct capacity planning, scaling, and resource optimization. (15%)
Minimum Qualifications
Bachelor’s Degree in IT, Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
At least 1 relevant certification (AWS, Azure, GCP, DevSecOps, Apache Kafka).
2+ years’platform engineering experience.
2+ years’cloud services experience with IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation).
Preferred Qualifications
5+ years of cloud engineering experience.
3+ years of Apache Kafka in regulated, mission-critical environments.
Proficiency in Java, Scala, or Python for Kafka applications.
Experience with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Kafka Streams.
Containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD pipelines.
Security knowledge: Kerberos, SSL, ACLs, IAM integration.
Familiarity with financial transaction systems and data privacy regulations.
Documentation: Update architecture diagrams, runbooks, and standards in Confluence.
Stakeholder Engagement: Meet with business units, address escalations.
Interaction Level High interaction with infrastructure engineers, network admins, project managers, and application owners. Expect daily or near-daily engagement. Top Priorities (First Weeks/Months) First Few Weeks:
Understand the existing Kafka ecosystem.
Gain visibility into data flows & integrations.
Review documentation & Jira backlog.
First Few Months:
Stabilize & optimize Kafka infrastructure.
Improve automation & observability.
Collaborate with teams to onboard new use cases.
Biggest Challenges
Balancing support for legacy systems while driving modernization and migration to AWS.