Senior Kafka DevOps Administrator

Job Summary

We are seeking a Senior Kafka DevOps Administrator to manage, optimize, and modernize enterprise-scale Confluent Platform and Apache Kafka environments. This role will focus on operating highly available on-premises Kafka clusters, leading hardware refresh initiatives, improving platform reliability, implementing automation, and ensuring high availability, disaster recovery, and operational excellence. Experience with AWS MSK is desirable to support hybrid and multi-environment deployments.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, administer, and optimize highly available Kafka clusters across on-premises and cloud environments.

• Lead Kafka infrastructure upgrades, hardware refreshes, cluster migrations, and cutover activities with minimal downtime.

• Configure and manage Kafka topics, partitions, replication, retention policies, quotas, and consumer groups.

• Administer Kafka ecosystem components including Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker/Confluent Replicator, and REST Proxy.

• Perform Kafka performance tuning, capacity planning, benchmarking, and cluster right-sizing.

• Implement automation for provisioning, deployment, monitoring, and operational tasks using scripting.

• Monitor Kafka infrastructure using DataDog, Grafana, JMX exporters, and centralized logging solutions.

• Develop disaster recovery strategies, backup/restore procedures, multi-region deployment plans, and incident response processes.

• Troubleshoot Linux, networking, and Kafka platform issues to ensure maximum availability and performance.

• Produce comprehensive technical documentation, operational runbooks, and knowledge transfer materials.

Required Skills

• 5+ years of experience in Systems Engineering, DevOps, Platform Engineering, or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).

• 4+ years of hands-on experience managing Apache Kafka in large-scale production environments.

• Strong expertise in Kafka internals, including partitions, replication, retention, compaction, ISR, and consumer group rebalancing.

• Hands-on experience with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker, and Confluent Replicator.

• Strong Linux administration, networking (TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing), and performance troubleshooting skills.

• Experience with automation and scripting for infrastructure management.

• Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability tools such as DataDog, Grafana, JMX exporters, and log aggregation platforms.

• Experience implementing disaster recovery, multi-region architectures, and incident management processes.

• Excellent technical documentation and communication skills.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with Apache Kafka on AWS MSK.

• Experience with Confluent Platform administration and operations.

• Knowledge of Kafka Streams and ksqlDB.

• Experience performing hardware refreshes, cluster rebuilds, or large-scale Kafka migrations with minimal downtime.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Engineering or a related technical discipline.

• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and problem-solving skills.

• Ability to work effectively in a collaborative DevOps and SRE environment.