Kafka Operations Administrator

Kafka Operations AdministratorLocation: Seattle, WA/St. Louis, Mo / TXFTE OnlyJob DescriptionMust Have Technical/Functional SkillsProduction-grade Apache Kafka operations experience, managing, maintaining and upgrading Kafka clusters in production environments with a focus on high availability, disaster recovery, fail-over and overall reliabilityProficiency in installing and configuring monitoring systems using Grafana (building dashboards), Prometheus, Splunk, JMX metrics.Automation and orchestration experience: Terraform, Ansible, Helm, Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE).Strong Linux system administration experience, including troubleshooting, automation and scripting for efficient infrastructure management.Experience in Production Support (ITIL processes followed) and participating in 24x7 on-call rotations, documenting incidents/postmortems.Experience in supporting JVM tuning, GC Analysis, network and disk I/O diagnosticsExperience in TCP/IP, routing, switching and firewall configurations relevant to Kafka operationsGood to Have:Deep Kafka performance tuning and capacity planning experienceKnowledge of message delivery semantics and guarantees (at-least-once, exactly-once)Cloud-native security/compliance experience (IAM, VPC, KMS, Security Groups)Certifications: Confluent Certified Administrator, AWS/Azure/GCP certificationsExperience with Apache Kafka in KRaft mode, including set up, configuration, troubleshooting and cluster managementContainerization and Container Orchestration Tools experience: Docker, KubernetesExperience with CI/CD pipelines and Git-based workflowsExperience building custom Kafka connect libraries and understanding of data serialization formats (eg: Avro, JSON)Knowledge of networking concepts across on-prem VMs and cloud environments, ensuring seamless integration and communication between services.Strong understanding of topic management and security best practices for streaming platforms: TLS, ACLs, RBAC, encryption at rest/in transitKafka ecosystem tooling experience: Kafka Connect, Schema RegistryRole and Responsibilities :Deploy, configure and manage Kafka clusters and related services to meet SLA requirementParticipate in 24x7 on-call rotation to respond to incidents, alerts, and escalationsTriage, diagnose, and remediate production incidents; coordinate with stakeholders, developers and infrastructure teamsImplement automation for provisioning, scaling, server/data backups, and disaster recoveryMaintain monitoring, alerting thresholds, dashboards, and Kafka ecosystem healthHarden Kafka deployments: configure TLS, ACLs, RBAC, encryption, and vulnerability remediationPerform routine maintenance: Kafka ecosystem upgrades (controllers, brokers, connect, and schema registry), rolling restarts, etc.