Kafka Engineer

Role

Jr Kafka Engineer / Administrator

Location

Denver, Colorado (Onsite)

Open for C2C

OPT EAD is also accepted

Key Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, configure, upgrade, and maintain highly available, scalable Apache

Kafka and Confluent Platform clusters for real-time data processing across production

and non-production environments.

• Monitor platform health, broker performance, replication, partition balance, throughput,

storage utilization, consumer lag, and connector status; troubleshoot incidents and tune

the platform for reliability, performance, and minimal downtime.

• Build and support Kafka topics, partitions, replication policies, schemas, service

accounts, and Kafka Connect integrations, including connectors for Amazon S3, Trino,

and OpenSearch; assist application and data teams with producer and consumer

integration.

• Implement and maintain platform security and compliance controls, including TLS

encryption, SASL authentication, access control lists, role-based access control, secrets

management, auditability, and secure certificate lifecycle practices.

• Automate cluster provisioning, configuration, scaling, upgrades, patching, and

operational tasks using Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD pipelines, and Python or shell

scripting.

• Plan and test backup, recovery, failover, cross-cluster replication, and disaster recovery

procedures to support defined service-level objectives and business continuity

requirements.

• Participate in production support and on-call rotation, lead technical troubleshooting,

document root cause analyses, and coordinate resolution with application teams,

infrastructure teams, incident managers, vendors, and cloud support personnel.

• Provide technical guidance on Kafka architecture and operational best practices;

maintain runbooks, standards, diagrams, capacity plans, and support documentation;

and remain current with Apache Kafka and Confluent capabilities.

Required Qualifications

• 3+ years of hands-on experience administering enterprise Apache Kafka or Confluent

Platform environments, including production cluster design, capacity planning,

upgrades, patching, performance tuning, and lifecycle management.

• 3+ years of experience troubleshooting complex Kafka issues involving broker

availability, replication, partitioning, rebalance behavior, consumer lag, throughput,

latency, storage, and Kafka Connect task failures.

• 3+ years of experience automating infrastructure and platform operations with Terraform

and Ansible, supported by Git-based CI/CD pipelines and Python or shell scripting.

• Demonstrated experience designing and supporting highly available Kafka

architectures, including cross-cluster replication, failover, backup, recovery, and disaster

recovery testing.

• Deep understanding of Kafka security and governance, including TLS, SASL, ACLs,

RBAC, Schema Registry compatibility, service accounts, credential management, and

audit controls.

• Experience designing and operating observability capabilities using Prometheus,

Grafana, Confluent Control Center, OpenSearch, or equivalent solutions, including

actionable dashboards and alert thresholds.

• Proven ability to define engineering standards, advise application teams on producer

and consumer patterns, review platform designs, and lead technical resolution across

multiple teams.

• Proven excellence in client-facing communication, technical documentation, incident

leadership, root cause analysis, and consulting skills in English.

• Ability to work in office, participate in an on-call rotation, and collaborate with senior

client resources and vendor support teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Confluent Platform or Confluent Cloud components such as Food and Beverage or

ZooKeeper, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Control Center, Cluster Linking, and

stream-processing capabilities.

• Experience operating Kafka on AWS, Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, or another cloud

or container platform; AWS Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)

experience is beneficial.

• Experience with GitLab, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Argo CD, or comparable CI/CD and

GitOps tooling.

• Experience integrating Kafka with Amazon S3, Trino, OpenSearch, relational databases,

IBM MQ, data warehouses, or other enterprise source and sink systems.

• Familiarity with data governance, schema evolution, topic naming and retention

standards, capacity forecasting, service-level objectives, and platform cost optimization.

• Relevant certification or formal training in Apache Kafka, Confluent, AWS, Kubernetes,

Terraform, Ansible, or related technologies