Cloud Platform Developer

ONLY USC/GC - W2 ROLE

Must Have Skills:
⦁ Must have deep, hands‑on experience running Kafka in large‑scale production environments, including cluster operations, upgrades, patches, and migrations.
⦁ Should understand Kafka internals such as partitions, replication, retention/compaction, and rebalance strategies.
o Kafka Administration
o Platform / SRE / DevOps Experience
o Kafka Ecosystem Tools
o Linux + Networking
o Automation / Scripting
o Monitoring / Observability
o Disaster Recovery

Nice to Have Skills:
⦁ AWS MSK / Apache Kafka Cloud: Experience with MSK operations and cloud‑aligned Kafka environments.
⦁ Helpful for cross‑environment consistency between on‑prem and cloud.
⦁ Hardware Refresh Experience: Prior work leading Kafka hardware refreshes or cluster rebuilds.

Detailed Job Description:

Minimum Qualifications- Education & Prior Job Experience:
We’re seeking a senior contract Kafka/Confluent administrator to own and evolve our on-prem event streaming platform, with a primary focus on Confluent Platform. You will lead planning and execution of a hardware refresh for our on-prem clusters, drive reliability and performance, and embed DevOps/automation across provisioning, deployment, observability, and incident response. Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK is desired for secondary support and cross-environment alignment. Comprehensive documentation and runbooks are required deliverables.

Kafka Platform Support Key Responsibilities
⦁ Design, deploy, and operate highly available Kafka clusters (on-prem, cloud, and/or managed services such as Confluent Cloud or AWS MSK).
⦁ Manage topics, partitions, quotas, retention policies, and consumer group strategies for performance and cost.
⦁ Own upgrades, patches, and migrations.
⦁ Implement and manage Kafka components: Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker/Confluent Replicator, REST Proxy; familiarity with Kafka Streams and ksqlDB is a plus.
⦁ Performance tuning (producers/consumers, batching, compression, acks, ISR, controller health), throughput testing, and benchmarking.
⦁ Capacity planning, partitioning strategy, and cluster right-sizing.

Contract Deliverables
⦁ Hardware refresh plan: capacity model, sizing, architecture diagrams, migration/cutover strategy, risk register
⦁ Implement and validated on-prem clusters on refreshed hardware with performance benchmarks
⦁ Operational documentation: standards, runbooks, monitoring/alerts configuration, backup/restore and DR playbooks.
⦁ Knowledge transfer sessions and documentation handoff at milestones and project close.

Minimum Qualifications
⦁ 5+ years in systems/platform engineering, SRE, or DevOps; 4+ years operating Kafka in production at scale.
⦁ Deep knowledge of Kafka internals: partitions, replication, retention/compaction, rebalance strategies.
⦁ Hands-on with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker/Confluent Replicator.
⦁ Strong Linux fundamentals; networking (TCP, DNS, load balancing), and performance analysis.
⦁ Proficiency in automation/scripting.
⦁ Monitoring/observability: Data Dog, Grafana, JMX exporters, and log aggregation.
⦁ Experience with DR, multi-region design, and incident management.
⦁ Proven ability to produce clear, comprehensive documentation

Preferred Qualifications
⦁ Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK operations and integration.
⦁ Experience executing hardware refreshes mor major cluster rebuilds/migrations with minimal downtime.

Minimum Years of Experience:
⦁ 5+ years

Certifications Needed:
⦁ None

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