Senior Kafka/Confluent Administrator

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.

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