Senior Kafka Administrator

About the role

Manage and optimize enterprise event-streaming platforms, with a primary focus on Confluent Platform and on-premises Kafka clusters.

Tasks

• Design, deploy, administer, and support highly available Kafka clusters.
• Lead on-premises Kafka hardware refreshes, cluster rebuilds, and migrations.
• Manage Kafka upgrades, patches, topics, partitions, retention policies, and quotas.
• Optimize throughput, latency, replication, and overall cluster performance.
• Implement monitoring, dashboards, alerts, and automated operational processes.
• Support Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and replication components.
• Develop capacity models, architecture diagrams, migration plans, and risk registers.
• Create operational standards, runbooks, backup/restore procedures, and DR playbooks.
• Troubleshoot production incidents and ensure platform reliability.
• Conduct knowledge-transfer sessions and provide complete documentation.

Requirements

• 5+ Years Platform Engineering | 4+ Years Kafka
• Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform Administration
• Production Kafka Cluster Management
• Kafka Topics, Partitions, Replication & Consumer Groups
• Kafka Connect & Schema Registry
• MirrorMaker / Confluent Replicator
• Linux Administration & Networking
• Performance Tuning & Capacity Planning
• Python / Shell Scripting & Automation
• Datadog, Grafana, JMX Exporters & Log Monitoring
• Disaster Recovery, Incident Management & RCA
• Technical Documentation & Operational Runbooks
• Preferred: AWS MSK / Confluent Cloud
• Preferred: Kafka REST Proxy
• Preferred: Kafka Streams / ksqlDB
• Preferred: Hardware Refresh & Cluster Migration
• Preferred: High Availability & Multi-Region Architecture
• Preferred: DevOps / SRE Practices

Schedule

• Onsite

How to apply

• Share your updated resume and LinkedIn profile.

Location

• Denver, CO / St. Louis, MO