We are seeking a highly skilled Kafka Operations Administrator to manage and maintain production-grade Apache Kafka clusters. The ideal candidate will have deep experience in Kafka operations, monitoring, automation, and production support within enterprise environments. This role includes 24x7 on-call responsibilities, incident management, performance tuning, and ensuring high availability and disaster recovery.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Deploy, configure, and manage Kafka clusters and related services to meet SLA requirements
• Participate in 24x7 on-call rotation, responding to incidents, alerts, and escalations
• Triage, diagnose, and remediate production incidents; coordinate with stakeholders, developers, and infrastructure teams
• Implement automation for provisioning, scaling, backups, and disaster recovery
• Maintain monitoring, alerting thresholds, dashboards, and Kafka ecosystem health
• Harden Kafka deployments by configuring TLS, ACLs, RBAC, encryption, and vulnerability remediation
• Perform routine maintenance including Kafka ecosystem upgrades (controllers, brokers, connect, and schema registry) and rolling restarts
• Create and maintain runbooks, automation scripts, and post-incident reports
• Optimize performance and resource utilization through benchmarking and tuning
• Support Kafka Connect and Schema Registry services; troubleshoot connector issues
• Contribute to CI/CD pipeline improvements for infrastructure and deployment automation

Required Technical / Functional Skills

• Production-grade Apache Kafka operations experience, including managing, maintaining, and upgrading Kafka clusters
• Strong experience with high availability, disaster recovery, failover, and overall reliability
• Proficient in monitoring and observability tools, including:
  • Grafana (dashboards)
  • Prometheus
  • Splunk
  • JMX metrics
• Automation and orchestration expertise using:
  • Terraform
  • Ansible
  • Helm
  • Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE)
• Strong Linux system administration, including troubleshooting and scripting for infrastructure management
• Production support experience following ITIL processes
• Experience in 24x7 on-call rotations, incident documentation, and postmortems
• Experience with JVM tuning, GC analysis, and network/disk I/O diagnostics
• Strong understanding of TCP/IP, routing, switching, and firewall configurations relevant to Kafka operations

Required Skills

• Deep Kafka performance tuning and capacity planning experience
• Knowledge of message delivery semantics and guarantees (at-least-once, exactly-once)
• Cloud-native security/compliance experience (IAM, VPC, KMS, Security Groups)
• Relevant certifications: Confluent Certified Administrator, AWS/Azure/GCP
• Experience with Apache Kafka in KRaft mode
• Containerization and orchestration experience (Docker, Kubernetes)
• CI/CD pipeline and Git-based workflows
• Experience building custom Kafka Connect libraries and knowledge of serialization formats (Avro, JSON)
• Strong understanding of networking across on-prem and cloud environments
• Best practices for topic management and streaming security (TLS, ACLs, RBAC, encryption)
• Kafka ecosystem tooling experience (Kafka Connect, Schema Registry)

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (preferred)
• 7+ years of experience in Kafka operations or platform engineering
• Proven experience in production support and infrastructure automation

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