Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator

Description Hybrid 4 onsite in Maryland Heights, MO

Our client seeks a Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator to support and administer Kafka platforms across on-premises Cloudera and Confluent environments and AWS MSK. The role will operate Kafka in production, drive reliability, and partner with producer and consumer teams. The engineer will maintain Terraform infrastructure and GitLab CI/CD pipelines, enhance observability with Datadog, and contribute to ongoing modernization and workload transitions to AWS MSK.

We can facilitate w2 and corp-to-corp consultants. For our w2 consultants, we offer a great benefits package that includes Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits, 401k with company matching, and life insurance. Rate: $60.00 to $70.00/hr. w2

Responsibilities

• Administer and operate Kafka clusters across Cloudera, Confluent Platform, and AWS MSK.
• Provide daily operational support including incident response, on-call participation, root-cause analysis, and reliability improvements.
• 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 performance troubleshooting.
• Configure and maintain security including TLS/SSL, SASL, mTLS, IAM for MSK, RBAC/ACLs, and encryption at rest and in transit.
• Partner on migration and modernization efforts from on-prem to AWS MSK using mechanisms such as MirrorMaker 2, Confluent Replicator, or cluster linking.
• Validate topic parity, offsets, throughput, and data integrity before and after transitions, and help define rollback and dry-run plans.
• Build and maintain Kafka/MSK infrastructure with Terraform and manage deployments via GitLab CI/CD with GitOps practices.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and dashboards in Datadog for broker metrics, consumer lag, partition health, JVM/GC, and throughput.
• Coordinate with producer and consumer teams on client configuration, schema management, partitioning, idempotence, and delivery semantics.
• Document runbooks, share knowledge, and support a collaborative team culture.

Experience Requirements

• 5+ years in data, platform, or infrastructure engineering with 4+ years operating Apache Kafka in production.
• Hands-on administration with Cloudera and Confluent Platform.
• Production experience with AWS MSK including provisioning, configuration, IAM, and networking.
• Strong Terraform and GitLab CI/CD experience for infrastructure automation.
• Hands-on Datadog experience for monitoring, dashboards, and alerting.
• Deep understanding of Kafka internals including partitions, replication, ISR, offsets, consumer groups, and delivery semantics.
• Solid AWS fundamentals including VPC, security groups, IAM, KMS, CloudWatch, and PrivateLink.
• Strong Linux, networking, and scripting skills in Bash and Python.
• Effective communication and collaboration skills.
• Preferred: experience with MirrorMaker 2, Confluent Replicator, or cluster linking, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, ksqlDB, Kafka Streams or Flink, Kubernetes or EKS, relevant certifications, and large enterprise or regulated environments.

Education Requirements