Senior Kafka Administrator

Senior Kafka Administrator – Terraform & AWS

Locations: Denver, CO or St. Louis, MO

Relocation: Candidates willing to relocate to either location are welcome.

Key Skills

• Strong hands-on Terraform experience
• CI/CD expertise using any major toolset or platform
• Apache Kafka Administration, preferably with Confluent Platform or AWS MSK

Key Responsibilities

Kafka Administration

• Deploy, configure, and manage Apache Kafka clusters and AWS MSK environments.
• Monitor broker health, partitions, replication factors, and consumer lag.
• Perform capacity planning, cluster scaling, and performance troubleshooting.
• Manage Kafka security using SSL/TLS, SASL, ACLs, and encryption standards.
• Support Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Cruise Control, and MirrorMaker.

AWS Cloud Administration

• Manage AWS services including EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, EBS, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and AWS Glue.
• Support AWS MSK, EMR, Lambda, and Airflow environments.
• Implement cloud security and governance best practices.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning and optimize cloud resource utilization and costs.

DevOps & Automation

• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar tools.
• Automate infrastructure deployment using Terraform, CloudFormation, and Ansible.
• Manage source control repositories and release processes.
• Implement monitoring and alerting using Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, ELK, or CloudWatch.
• Support Docker and Kubernetes environments.
• Develop automation scripts using Python, Shell, or Bash.

Operations & Support

• Provide L2/L3 production support and participate in on-call rotations.
• Manage incidents, perform root cause analysis (RCA), and implement preventive measures.
• Maintain operational documentation and standard operating procedures.
• Ensure compliance with security, audit, and regulatory requirements.

Required Skills

• Apache Kafka Administration
• Strong Terraform and CI/CD experience
• AWS Cloud Services
• Linux (RHEL/Rocky Linux)
• Shell scripting and Python
• Jenkins, Git, and Ansible
• Docker and Kubernetes
• Monitoring tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, and Splunk
• Networking, security, high availability, performance tuning, and capacity planning

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.
• Experience with Confluent Platform, AWS MSK, Cloudera CDP, Airflow, or Spark.
• AWS, GCP, Kafka, or Kubernetes certifications.
• Experience supporting large-scale production environments, including petabyte-scale workloads.

Expected Outcomes

• Maintain platform availability above 99.9%.
• Improve automation, troubleshooting efficiency, cluster performance, and resource utilization.
• Ensure secure, scalable, and reliable platform operations supporting data engineering, analytics, and AI/ML workloads.