Kafka Platform Engineer

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.

Must have deep, handson experience running Kafka in largescale production environments, including cluster operations, upgrades, patches, and migrations.

Should understand Kafka internals such as partitions, replication, retention/compaction, and rebalance strategies.

Kafka Administration

Platform / SRE / DevOps Experience

Kafka Ecosystem Tools

Linux + Networking, 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.