Senior Kafka Administrator

Tasks

• Design, deploy, and operate highly available Kafka clusters (on-prem, cloud, and/or managed services such as Confluent Cloud or AWS MSK).
• Manage topics, partitions, quotas, retention policies, and consumer group strategies for performance and cost.
• Own upgrades, patches, and migrations.
• Implement and manage Kafka components: Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker/Confluent Replicator, REST Proxy.
• Performance tuning (producers/consumers, batching, compression, acks, ISR, controller health), throughput testing, and benchmarking.
• Capacity planning, partitioning strategy, and cluster right-sizing.
• Lead planning and execution of a hardware refresh for on prem clusters.
• Drive reliability and performance, and embed DevOps/automation across provisioning, deployment, observability, and incident response.
• Deliver a hardware refresh plan: capacity model, sizing, architecture diagrams, migration/cutover strategy, risk register.
• Implement and validate on-prem clusters on refreshed hardware with performance benchmarks.
• Provide operational documentation: standards, runbooks, monitoring/alerts configuration, backup/restore and DR playbooks.
• Conduct knowledge transfer sessions and documentation handoff at milestones and project close.

Requirements

• Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK is desired for secondary support and cross environment alignment.
• Comprehensive documentation and runbooks are required deliverables.
• Familiarity with Kafka Streams and ksqlDB is a plus.
• 5+ years in systems/platform engineering, SRE, or DevOps; 4+ years operating Kafka in production at scale.
• Deep knowledge of Kafka internals: partitions, replication, retention/comp

Schedule

• Contract

Location

• Denver, CO or St. Louis, MO