Senior Kafka Devops Administrator

Must have skills:
Deep knowledge of Kafka internals: partitions, replication, retention/compaction, rebalance strategies
Hands-on with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Mirror Maker/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

Good to Have Skills
Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK operations and integration
Experience executing hardware refreshes or major cluster rebuilds/migrations with minimal downtime

Detailed Job Description:
5 years in systems/platform engineering, SRE, or DevOps;
4 years operating Kafka in production at scale.
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.
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, Mirror Maker/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.
Hardware refresh planning, migration/cutover strategy, monitoring, backup/restore and DR playbooks, knowledge transfer and documentation handoff.

Minimum years of experience: 5-8 years
Education: Bachelor's or Master of Engineering