Senior Kafka Engineer/Administrator

About the role

Senior, hands-on Kafka Engineer/Administrator responsible for operating Kafka across Cloudera, Confluent Platform, and AWS MSK, while leading the migration from on-premises environments to AWS MSK.

The role will also involve Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, Datadog, Kafka security, monitoring, infrastructure automation, and coordination with producer/consumer application teams.

Tasks

• Manage Kafka clusters across Cloudera, Confluent, and AWS MSK.
• Manage topics, partitions, replication, retention, quotas, ACLs, and consumer groups.
• Perform tuning, patching, upgrades, capacity planning, and troubleshooting.
• Manage Kafka security including TLS/SSL, SASL, mTLS, IAM, RBAC/ACLs, and encryption.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in data/platform/infrastructure engineering.
• 4+ years of hands-on Apache Kafka production experience.
• Strong administration experience with Cloudera and Confluent Platform.
• Production experience with AWS MSK, including provisioning, configuration, IAM authentication, and networking.
• Experience migrating Kafka workloads from on-premises to AWS.
• Strong Terraform and GitLab CI/CD experience.
• Hands-on Datadog experience for monitoring, dashboards, and alerting.
• Strong understanding of Kafka internals: partitions, replication, ISR, offsets, consumer groups, and delivery semantics.
• Strong AWS knowledge: VPC, Security Groups, IAM, KMS, CloudWatch, and PrivateLink.
• Strong Linux, networking, Bash, and Python skills.
• Excellent communication and coordination skills.
• Preferred: MirrorMaker 2, Confluent Replicator, or Cluster Linking.
• Preferred: Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, and ksqlDB.
• Preferred: Kafka Streams or Flink.
• Preferred: Kubernetes/EKS and Strimzi.
• Preferred: Confluent Certified Administrator or AWS certifications.
• Preferred: Experience in regulated or large enterprise environments.

Schedule

• 4days/wk in office

Location

• Must be local to Denver, CO or St. Louis, MO - local only