IW
Kafka Admin
Info Way Solutions LLC
🇺🇸 United States
On-site
Staff / Principal
4 months ago
- Confluent
- Devops
- Incident Response
- Apache Kafka
- AWS
- Kafka Connect
- Kafka Streams
- Linux
- TCP
- DNS
- Load Balancing
- Grafana
- Incident Management
4 months ago
Denver, CO or St. Louis, MO
In-person Interview Must
We're seeking a senior contract Kafka/Confluent administrator to own and evolve our on-prem event streaming platform, with a primary focus on Confluent Platform. You will lead planning and execution of a hardware refresh for our on-prem clusters, drive reliability and performance, and embed DevOps/automation across provisioning, deployment, observability, and incident response. Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK is desired for secondary support and cross-environment alignment. Comprehensive documentation and runbooks are required deliverables.
Kafka Platform Support Key Responsibilities
⦁ Design, deploy, and operate highly available Kafka clusters (on-prem, cloud, and/or managed services such as Confluent Cloud or AWS MSK).
⦁ Manage topics, partitions, quotas, retention policies, and consumer group strategies for performance and cost.
⦁ Own upgrades, patches, and migrations.
⦁ Implement and manage Kafka components: Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker/Confluent Replicator, REST Proxy; familiarity with Kafka Streams and ksqlDB is a plus.
⦁ Performance tuning (producers/consumers, batching, compression, acks, ISR, controller health), throughput testing, and benchmarking.
⦁ Capacity planning, partitioning strategy, and cluster right-sizing.
Contract Deliverables
⦁ Hardware refresh plan: capacity model, sizing, architecture diagrams, migration/cutover strategy, risk register
⦁ Implement and validated on-prem clusters on refreshed hardware with performance benchmarks
⦁ Operational documentation: standards, runbooks, monitoring/alerts configuration, backup/restore and DR playbooks.
⦁ Knowledge transfer sessions and documentation handoff at milestones and project close.
Minimum Qualifications
⦁ 5+ years in systems/platform engineering, SRE, or DevOps; 4+ years operating Kafka in production at scale.
⦁ Deep knowledge of Kafka internals: partitions, replication, retention/compaction, rebalance strategies.
⦁ Hands-on with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker/Confluent Replicator.
⦁ Strong Linux fundamentals; networking (TCP, DNS, load balancing), and performance analysis.
⦁ Proficiency in automation/scripting.
⦁ Monitoring/observability: Data Dog, Grafana, JMX exporters, and log aggregation.
⦁ Experience with DR, multi-region design, and incident management.
⦁ Proven ability to produce clear, comprehensive documentation
Preferred Qualifications
⦁ Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK operations and integration.
⦁ Experience executing hardware refreshes mor major cluster rebuilds/migrations with minimal downtime.
Kafka Admin · Info Way Solutions LLC