Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator

Please Contact:  To discuss this amazing opportunity, reach out to our Talent Acquisition Specialist Amanchi Suhane at email address  

Amanchi.Suhane@generistek.com

can be reached on # 630-576-9037.
 
We have Contract role Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator Hybrid for client at Denver CO. Please let me know if you or any of your friends would be interested in this position.
 
Position Details:
Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator Hybrid-Denver CO
Location                            : Denver, CO - 80201 or St. Louis, MO - 63101 (Hybrid)
Project Duration           : 12 months (Contract to Hire)
Pay Rate                            : $40 - $45 an hour on W2
Position Summary:
Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator
 
We are migrating a portfolio of Apache Kafka clusters from on-premises platforms (Cloudera and Confluent) to AWS MSK, managed through a CI/CD pipeline built on Terraform and GitLab. We are looking for a senior, hands-on Kafka engineer to own day-to-day Kafka administration across both environments, drive the migration, and coordinate closely with producer and consumer application teams to ensure a smooth, low-risk cutover. This is a senior individual-contributor role for someone who has run Kafka at scale in production, is comfortable in a hybrid on-prem/cloud world, and can act as the technical point of contact between platform and application teams.
 
Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years in data/platform/infrastructure engineering, with 4+ years’ operating Apache Kafka in production.
• Hands-on administration experience with Cloudera and Confluent Platform.
• Production experience with AWS MSK (provisioning, configuration, IAM auth, networking).
• Proven experience migrating Kafka workloads to the cloud with minimal disruption.
• Strong Terraform and GitLab CI/CD experience for infrastructure automation.
• Hands-on Datadog experience for monitoring, dashboards, and alerting.
• Deep understanding of Kafka internals: partitions, replication, ISR, offsets, consumer groups, and delivery semantics.
• Solid AWS fundamentals: VPC, security groups, IAM, KMS, CloudWatch, Private Link.
• Strong Linux, networking, and scripting skills (Bash, Python).
• Excellent communication and coordination skills to work across producer/consumer teams.

 
Preferred Skills / Nice to Have:

• Experience with Mirror Maker 2, Confluent Replicator, or cluster linking for replication/migration.
• Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, and ksq lDB experience.
• Kafka Streams or Flink familiarity.
• Kubernetes / EKS experience (e.g., Strimzi).
• Certifications: Confluent Certified Administrator, AWS Solutions Architect/DevOps.
• Experience in a regulated or large enterprise environment.

 
Mandatory Skills:

• Apache Kafka (Cloudera and Confluent)
• Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator

 
Deliverables:

• Kafka Administration (On-Prem + Cloud)

• Administer and operate Kafka clusters across Cloudera, Confluent Platform, and AWS MSK.
• Manage topics, partitions, replication, retention, quotas, ACLs, and consumer groups.
• Tune brokers, producers, and consumers for throughput, latency, and reliability.
• Handle patching, upgrades, capacity planning, and cluster health/performance troubleshooting.
• Configure and maintain security: TLS/SSL, SASL, MTLS, IAM (for MSK), RBAC/ACLs, and encryption at rest and in transit.

 

• Migration to AWS MSK

• Plan and execute migration of clusters and workloads from on-prem (Cloudera/Confluent) to AWS MSK.
• Design cutover strategies (e.g., Mirror Maker 2 / Confluent Replicator / cluster linking) with minimal downtime and no data loss.
• Validate topic parity, offsets, throughput, and data integrity pre- and post-migration.
• Define rollback plans and run migration dry-runs in lower environments.

 

• CI/CD & Infrastructure as Code

• Build and maintain Kafka/MSK infrastructure using Terraform.
• Manage automated deployments and configuration through GitLab CI/CD pipelines.
• Implement Git Ops practices for topic, ACL, and cluster configuration management.
• Enforce version control, code review, and environment promotion (dev ? test ? prod).

 

• Observability & Monitoring

• Build and maintain monitoring, alerting, and dashboards in Datadog for Kafka/MSK (broker metrics, consumer lag, partition health, JVM/GC, throughput).
• Establish SLAs/SLOs and proactive alerting to reduce incidents and mean-time-to-resolution.
• Correlate Kafka metrics with application and infrastructure telemetry.

 

• Producer / Consumer Coordination

• Serve as the primary technical liaison between the Kafka platform team and producer/consumer application teams.
• Advise application teams on client configuration, serialization/schema management, partitioning strategy, idempotence, and exactly-once/at-least-once semantics.
• Support onboarding of new producers/consumers and troubleshoot client-side issues (rebalancing, lag, poison messages).
• Coordinate migration schedules, testing, and cutover windows with each impacted team.

 
 
To discuss this amazing opportunity, reach out to our Talent Acquisition Specialist Amanchi Suhane at email address  

Amanchi.Suhane@generistek.com

can be reached on # 630-576-9037.
 
About generis Tek: generis tek is a boutique it/professional staffing based in Chicago land. We offer both contingent labor & permanent placement services to several fortune 500 clients nationwide. Our philosophy is based on delivering long-term value and build lasting relationships with our clients, consultants and employees. Our fundamental success lies in understanding our clients’ specific needs and working very closely with our consultants to create a right fit for both sides. We aspire to be our client has most trusted business partner.