Kafka Architect

Job title: Kafka Architect
Location: Tunnel Hill, GA (Hybrid)

Minimum years of experience: 10

Job Description:
We are looking for a senior engineer with 10 years of experience in event streaming, Kafka platform engineering, Kubernetes, and cloud-native infrastructure.
The candidate should have strong hands-on expertise in Apache Kafka, Confluent Platform, and Confluent Cloud, including cluster design, topic management, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, RBAC, ACLs, quotas, security, monitoring, troubleshooting, and performance tuning.
The role requires experience deploying and operating Confluent Platform on Kubernetes using Confluent for Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, GitOps, and CI/CD automation.
Experience with Ansible-based Confluent Platform installation, upgrade automation, and configuration management will be highly valuable.
The candidate should have practical knowledge of Kafka security setup, including SASL_SSL, mTLS, certificates, secrets, service accounts, identity pools, API keys, RBAC, ACLs, and secure connectivity patterns.
Responsibilities include Kafka platform setup, environment standardization, cluster upgrades, certificate renewal, ZooKeeper to KRaft migration planning/execution, disaster recovery support, capacity planning, incident resolution, and production readiness reviews.
The candidate should be able to design monitoring and alerting using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, JMX exporter, Open Telemetry, Confluent Metrics API, Datadog, Splunk, or similar platforms.
Cloud knowledge across Azure, AWS, or GCP is expected, especially around networking, private endpoints, DNS, firewall rules, IAM, key vaults/secrets, storage, and secure access.
Experience with Terraform for Confluent Cloud provisioning, including environments, clusters, topics, service accounts, API keys, identity pools, RBAC/ACLs, networking, and access automation, is desirable.

TOP skills
1. Confluent Kafka
2. Cloud Infrastructure
3. Docker