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Kafka Tier 3 Support Engineer
Job in
Canton, Norfolk County, Massachusetts, 02021, USA
Listed on 2026-06-03
Listing for:
TATA Consulting Services
Full Time
position Listed on 2026-06-03
Job specializations:
-
IT/Tech
Cybersecurity, Data Security, IT Support, Cloud Computing
Job Description & How to Apply Below
Kafka & Streaming
* Strong hands on experience with Apache Kafka
* Experience supporting at least one of:
o AWS MSK
o Confluent Platform / Confluent Cloud
o Self managed Kafka (VM or Kubernetes)
* Deep understanding of:
o Brokers, partitions, replication, ISR, leader election
o Consumer groups and rebalancing
o Producer/consumer internals and failure modes
Operations & Performance
* Expertise in diagnosing:
o Consumer lag and throughput bottlenecks
o Broker disk, network, and JVM performance
o Metadata and controller instability
* Experience with monitoring and observability tools (Kafka metrics, Cloud Watch, Prometheus, Grafana, etc.)
Security & Governance
* Knowledge of Kafka security concepts:
o TLS, authentication (IAM/SASL/SCRAM), ACLs/RBAC
o Principle of least privilege
* Experience supporting regulated or multi tenant environments
Preferred / Nice to Have Skills
* Experience with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, or streaming frameworks
* Exposure to KRaft-based Kafka deployments
* Cloud platforms (AWS preferred; Azure/GCP beneficial)
* Automation and IaC experience for Kafka operations
* Experience in SRE or Dev Ops-aligned environments
Roles & Responsibilities
Key Responsibilities
1. 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:
o Broker instability, controller elections, ISR shrinkage
o Under replicated partitions and leader imbalance
o Producer/consumer failures, lag spikes, and rebalance storms
o Disk, network, JVM, and request handler saturation
* Provide hands on remediation for complex issues, including:
o Partition reassignment and leader rebalance
o Broker configuration tuning
o Throttle/quota strategies for noisy producers or consumers
* Coordin ate with vendor support during service incidents, providing logs, metrics, and forensic details.
* Guide Tier 2 teams during major incidents and validate restoration actions.
2. Kafka Performance Engineering & Optimization
* Analyze Kafka workloads for performance and scalability risks:
o Partition skew and hot partitions
o Inefficient producer batching/compression
o Consumer lag root cause analysis
o Thread pool, I/O, and network bottlenecks
* Recommend and validate:
o Topic design (partition count, replication factor, retention, compaction)
o Producer and consumer configuration best practices
o Quotas, quotas enforcement, and multi tenant controls
* Support onboarding of high throughput or latency sensitive workloads, ensuring Kafka is correctly sized and tuned.
3. Platform Stability, Reliability & Resilience
* Diagnose and resolve systemic Kafka stability issues:
o Repeated broker failures or flapping
o Metadata/controller instability (Zookeeper or KRaft)
o Recovery issues following failovers or maintenance events
* Support resilience initiatives:
o Multi AZ cluster health validation
o Replication and DR strategies (Mirror Maker 2, Replicator, or app level DR patterns)
o Failover testing and validation
* Define and improve Kafka SLOs for availability, durability, and latency.
4. Change, Upgrade & Configuration Leadership
* Lead medium to high risk Kafka changes, including:
o Broker and cluster configuration changes
o Partition expansion or large scale reassignment
o Topic policy changes impacting durability or performance
* Support and plan:
o Kafka version upgrades
o MSK / Confluent upgrade cycles
o Client compatibility and rollout strategies
* Participate in CAB reviews, assess risk, and design rollback and validation plans.
5. Root Cause Analysis & Continuous Improvement
* Own RCA documentation for major incidents with clear corrective and preventive actions (CAPA).
* Identify recurring failure patterns and architectural gaps.
* Re commend platform-level improvements:
o Automation opportunities
o Guardrails and standards
o Monitoring and alerting enhancements
* Contribute to continuous improvement of runbooks, knowledge base articles, and operational playbooks.
6. Mentorship & Collaboration
* Provide technical guidance and mentoring to Tier 2 Kafka support teams.
* Collaborate with:
o Application teams on Kafka client usage and best practices
o Platform and SRE teams on capacity planning and reliability engineering
o Security teams on access control, encryption, and compliance requirements
Act as a subject matter expert for Kafka within the organization.
Salary Range $120,000-$140,000 years
TCS Employee Benefits
Summary:
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 & amp;
Training Reimbursement.
Time Off:
Vacation, Time Off, Sick Leave & Holidays.
Legal & Financial Assistance:
Legal Assistance, 401K Plan, Performance Bonus, College Fund, Student Loan Refinancing.
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