Kafka Engineer Administrator

Title: Kafka Engineer / Administrator

Location: St. Louis, MO or Denver, CO (4 days hybrid)

Duration: Fulltime

Direct Candidates only- Not sponsoring Visa Candidates at this moment.

Job description:

We operate a portfolio of Apache Kafka clusters across on-premises platforms (Cloudera and Confluent) and AWS MSK, managed through a CI/CD pipeline built on Terraform and GitLab. We are looking for a senior, hands-on Kafka engineer to provide ongoing administration and operational support across these environments, keep our streaming platform healthy and reliable, and coordinate closely with producer and consumer application teams. In parallel, you will contribute to ongoing modernization and workload-transition efforts to AWS MSK.This is a collaborative, team-based role. You will work as part of a cross-functional streaming/data platform team alongside other engineers, SREs, application teams, and the engineering lead.

Key Responsibilities

• 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).
• Experience supporting and operating Kafka in production, including on-call and incident response.
• 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, PrivateLink.
• Strong Linux, networking, and scripting skills (Bash, Python).
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with a track record of working effectively in a team.