Confluent Kafka Systems Administrator

About the role

This is a hands-on Kafka Platform Administration & Production Operations role, NOT a Java Application Development position.

Client: Utilities Sector

Requirements

• Experienced Kafka Systems Administrator.
• Strong hands-on experience administering Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform in production.
• 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 with OpenShift / Kubernetes.
• Strong Linux administration and troubleshooting.
• Kafka security configuration: TLS, SASL, ACLs, and RBAC.
• Monitoring tools: Prometheus, Grafana, Dynatrace, and/or Splunk.
• GitHub, CI/CD automation, and ArgoCD / GitOps experience.
• Preferred: Oracle GoldenGate / Debezium CDC.
• Preferred: Confluent Control Center administration.
• Preferred: Helm, Terraform, and automation scripting.
• Preferred: Snowflake, Iceberg, AWS, or Azure integrations.
• Preferred: Java / Spring Boot knowledge for troubleshooting.
• Preferred: Experience in utilities or highly regulated enterprise environments.
• Candidates with primarily Java/Spring Boot producer, consumer, or microservices development experience will NOT qualify.
• Candidates must be able to explain Kafka / Confluent cluster installation and upgrades.
• Candidates must be able to explain cluster size, broker count, and Confluent version.
• Candidates must be able to explain broker-level configurations personally performed.
• Candidates must be able to explain major Kafka production incidents resolved.
• Candidates must be able to explain partition reassignment, replication, and ISR troubleshooting.
• Candidates must be able to explain Kafka security configuration.
• Candidates must be able to explain Kafka administration on OpenShift / Kubernetes.
• Local Candidates Only.

Schedule

• 12-month opportunity.
• Onsite.
• Duration: 12 Months
• 1st Round Virtual | 2nd Round In-Person

Location

• Columbus, OH