Senior Kafka Engineer/Administrator

About the role

We are migrating a portfolio of Apache Kafka clusters from on-premises platforms (Cloudera and Confluent) to AWS MSK, managed through a CI/CD pipeline built on Terraform and GitLab.

This is a senior individual-contributor role for someone who has run Kafka at scale in production, is comfortable in a hybrid on-prem/cloud world, and can act as the technical point of contact between platform and application teams.

Requirements

• 5+ years in data/platform/infrastructure engineering, with 4+ years operating Apache Kafka in production.
• Hands-on administration experience with Cloudera and Confluent Platform.
• Production experience with AWS MSK (provisioning, configuration, IAM auth, networking).
• Proven experience migrating Kafka workloads to the cloud with minimal disruption.
• Strong Terraform and GitLab CI/CD experience for infrastructure automation.
• Hands-on Datadog experience for monitoring, dashboards, and alerting.
• Deep understanding of Kafka internals: partitions, replication, ISR, offsets, consumer groups, and delivery semantics.
• Solid AWS fundamentals: VPC, security groups, IAM, KMS, CloudWatch, PrivateLink.
• Strong Linux, networking, and scripting skills (Bash, Python).
• Excellent communication and coordination skills to work across producer/consumer teams.
• Preferred / Nice to Have: Experience with MirrorMaker 2, Confluent Replicator, or cluster linking for replication/migration.
• Preferred / Nice to Have: Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, and ksqlDB experience.

Schedule

• 4days/wk in office
• Duration: 6+Months

Location

• Denver, CO or St. Louis, MO
• Must be local to Denver, CO or St. Louis, MO - local only OR willing to relocate from day 1