Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator – Denver, CO

Erostechnologies is hiring on behalf of a confidential client for a Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator in Denver, Colorado. This long-term contract role is hybrid, with four days per week in the office. Local candidates only; candidates must have more than 14 years of professional experience.

About the role

Lead the migration of production Kafka clusters from Cloudera and Confluent Platform to AWS Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (AWS MSK). You will use Terraform and GitLab CI/CD to automate infrastructure and help ensure the migration causes minimal disruption to production workloads.

Responsibilities

• Administer and support production Apache Kafka environments on Cloudera and Confluent Platform.
• Provision, configure, and migrate Kafka workloads to AWS MSK, including IAM authentication and networking.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning and deployment workflows using Terraform and GitLab CI/CD.
• Monitor Kafka services using Datadog dashboards and alerts.
• Apply expertise in partitions, replication, in-sync replicas (ISR), offsets, and consumer groups.
• Coordinate migration and operational activities with producer and consumer application teams.

Required qualifications

• Local candidates only; more than 14 years of professional experience.
• At least 4 years of hands-on Apache Kafka production experience.
• Strong administration experience with Cloudera and Confluent Platform.
• Hands-on AWS MSK provisioning, configuration, IAM authentication, networking, and on-premises-to-AWS Kafka migrations.
• Strong Terraform and GitLab CI/CD skills.
• Hands-on Datadog monitoring, dashboards, and alerting experience.
• Strong AWS knowledge, including VPC, IAM, KMS, CloudWatch, security groups, and PrivateLink.
• Proficiency in Linux, Bash, Python, and networking.
• Excellent communication and coordination skills.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with MirrorMaker 2, Confluent Replicator, or Cluster Linking.
• Knowledge of Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, and ksqlDB.
• Experience with Kafka Streams or Apache Flink.
• Kubernetes, EKS, or Strimzi experience.
• Confluent or AWS certifications.
• Experience in large enterprise or regulated environments.

Work arrangement and location

• Employment type: Long-term contract.
• Hybrid schedule: four days per week in the office.
• Locations listed: Denver, CO, and St. Louis, MO. Local candidates only.

How to apply

Share your updated resume to be considered for this Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator contract opportunity.