Kafka Administrator

Kafka Administrator

Location: Denver, CO / St. Louis, MO
Work Arrangement: Onsite
Experience: 10+ Years
Interview: Final round will be conducted in person

Job Summary

STAFFXPERT LLC is seeking a Kafka Administrator on behalf of our client in Denver, CO / St. Louis, MO.

We are looking for a highly experienced Kafka/Confluent Administrator to support, manage, and enhance enterprise-scale event streaming environments. The ideal candidate will bring strong hands-on expertise with Confluent Platform and Apache Kafka, particularly in on-premises environments, along with experience in platform upgrades, migrations, performance optimization, automation, and production support.

This role will also contribute to infrastructure modernization initiatives, including Kafka cluster hardware refreshes and improving operational reliability through DevOps and automation practices.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, administer, and maintain highly available Kafka and Confluent Platform clusters.

• Manage Kafka topics, partitions, replication, quotas, retention policies, and consumer groups.

• Plan and execute platform upgrades, patches, migrations, and hardware refresh initiatives.

• Configure and support Kafka components including Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker/Confluent Replicator, and REST Proxy.

• Monitor and optimize Kafka performance across producers, consumers, batching, compression, acknowledgments, ISR, and controller health.

• Perform capacity planning, cluster right-sizing, partitioning strategy, throughput testing, and benchmarking.

• Automate provisioning, deployment, monitoring, configuration, and operational tasks using DevOps practices.

• Monitor platform health, troubleshoot production issues, and participate in incident response and root-cause analysis.

• Maintain comprehensive technical documentation, operational procedures, and runbooks.

• Support alignment between on-premises and cloud-based Kafka environments.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of overall IT experience with strong hands-on Kafka administration experience.

• Extensive experience with Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform.

• Strong experience managing enterprise-scale, on-premises Kafka environments.

• Hands-on expertise with Kafka installation, configuration, administration, upgrades, patching, and migrations.

• Strong understanding of Kafka architecture, brokers, partitions, replication, ISR, producers, consumers, and consumer groups.

• Experience with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker/Confluent Replicator, and REST Proxy.

• Proven experience in Kafka performance tuning, troubleshooting, capacity planning, and cluster optimization.

• Experience with DevOps automation, monitoring, observability, and production support.

• Strong troubleshooting, analytical, and incident-management skills.

• Ability to work effectively in high-availability, business-critical production environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AWS MSK or other cloud-based Kafka environments.

• Familiarity with Confluent Cloud.

• Knowledge of Kafka Streams and ksqlDB.

• Experience supporting hybrid on-premises and cloud Kafka environments.