Kafka Tier 3 Support Engineer

Key Responsibilities

• Tier 3 Incident Management & Escalation Support:
  Act as the highest technical escalation point for Kafka production incidents (Sev 1 / Sev
  2).
• Lead deep troubleshooting across broker instability, controller elections, ISR shrinkage, under‑replicated partitions, leader imbalance, producer/consumer failures, lag spikes, rebalance storms, disk/network/JVM/request‑handler saturation.
• Provide hands‑on remediation for complex issues, including partition reassignment, leader rebalance, broker configuration tuning, and throttle/quota strategies for noisy producers or consumers.
• Coordinate with vendor support during service incidents, providing logs, metrics, and forensic details.
• Guide Tier 2 teams during major incidents and validate restoration actions.
• Kafka Performance Engineering & Optimization:
  Analyze Kafka workloads for performance and scalability risks such as partition skew, hot partitions, inefficient producer batching/compression, consumer lag root causes, and thread‑pool, I/O, and network bottlenecks.
• Recommend and validate topic design, producer/consumer configuration best practices, quotas, and multi‑tenant controls.
• Support onboarding of high‑throughput or latency‑sensitive workloads, ensuring Kafka is correctly sized and tuned.
• Platform Stability, Reliability & Resilience:
  Diagnose and resolve systematic Kafka stability issues, support resilience initiatives (Multi‑AZ cluster health validation, replication/DR strategies, failover testing), and define/ improve Kafka SLOs.
• Change, Upgrade & Configuration Leadership:
  Lead medium to high‑risk Kafka changes, support and plan version upgrades, and participate in CAB reviews, assessing risk and designing rollback and validation plans.
• Root Cause Analysis & Continuous Improvement:
  Own RCA documentation for major incidents, recommend platform‑level improvements (automation, guardrails, monitoring enhancements), and contribute to runbooks and operability playbooks.
• Mentorship &
  
  Collaboration:
  
  Provide technical guidance and mentoring to Tier 2 Kafka support teams; collaborate with application, platform, SRE, and security teams on capacity planning, best practices, and compliance.

• Strong hands‑on experience with Apache Kafka (brokers, producers, consumers).
• Experience supporting at least one of: AWS MSK, Confluent Platform / Confluent Cloud, or self‑managed Kafka on VM/Kubernetes.
• Deep understanding of brokers, partitions, replication, ISR, leader election, consumer groups and rebalancing, and producer/consumer internals and failure modes.
• Expertise in diagnosing consumer lag, throughput bottlenecks, broker disk/network/JVM performance, metadata and controller instability.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools:
  Kafka metrics, Cloud Watch, Prometheus, Grafana.
• Knowledge of Kafka security concepts: TLS, authentication (IAM/SASL/SCRAM), ACLs/RBAC; principle of least privilege; experience in regulated or multi‑tenant environments.
• Preferred:
  Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, or streaming frameworks; KRaft‑based deployments; AWS (preferred) or Azure/GCP; automation and IaC for Kafka operations; SRE or Dev Ops‑aligned experience.

Bachelor of Computer Science.

• Discretionary Annual Incentive.
• Comprehensive Medical Coverage:
  Medical & Health, Dental & Vision, Disability Planning & Insurance, Pet Insurance Plans.
• Family Support:
  Maternal & Parental Leaves.
• Insurance Options:
  Auto & Home Insurance, Identity Theft Protection.
• Convenience & Professional Growth:
  Commuter Benefits & Certification & Training Reimbursement.
• Time Off:
  Vacation, Sick Leave & Holidays.
• Legal & Financial Assistance:
  Legal Assistance, 401K Plan, Performance Bonus, College Fund, Student Loan Refinancing.

Salary Range $120,000-$140,000 per year.