Consultant | Cloud Platform | Amazon Webservices DevOps

Senior Kafka Devops Administrator

This role requires no travel. It is an onsite position from day one in Englewood, CO 80111 for a 6-month project. Minimum years of experience required: 5-8 Years. Education Qualification required:
Bachelor's or Master of Engineering.

Must have skills:

• Deep knowledge of Kafka internals: partitions, replication, retention/compaction, rebalance strategies
• Hands-on with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Mirror Maker/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

Good to have skills:

• Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK operations and integration
• Experience executing hardware refreshes or major cluster rebuilds/migrations with minimal downtime

Detailed

Job Description:

5+ years in systems/platform engineering, SRE, or Dev Ops; 4+ years' operating Kafka in production '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 Dev Ops/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. 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, Mirror Maker/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. Hardware refresh planning, migration/cutover strategy, monitoring, backup/restore and DR playbooks, knowledge transfer and documentation handoff.