Senior Kafka Engineer Administrator

Job Title: Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator
Location: Denver, CO or St. Louis, MO
Duration: 6+Months

About the Role

We are migrating a portfolio of Apache Kafka clusters from on-premises platforms (Cloudera and Confluent) to AWS MSK, managed through a CI/CD pipeline built on Terraform and GitLab. We are looking for a senior, hands-on Kafka engineer to own day-to-day Kafka administration across both environments, drive the migration, and coordinate closely with producer and consumer application teams to ensure a smooth, low-risk cutover.

This is a senior individual-contributor role for someone who has run Kafka at scale in production, is comfortable in a hybrid on-prem/cloud world, and can act as the technical point of contact between platform and application teams.

Required Qualifications

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).
Proven experience migrating Kafka workloads to the cloud with minimal disruption.
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 coordination skills to work across producer/consumer teams.

Preferred / Nice to Have

Experience with MirrorMaker 2, Confluent Replicator, or cluster linking for replication/migration.
Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, and ksqlDB experience.
Kafka Streams or Flink familiarity.
Kubernetes / EKS experience (e.g., Strimzi).
Certifications: Confluent Certified Administrator, AWS Solutions Architect/DevOps.
Experience in a regulated or large enterprise environment