Senior Kafka Administrator

Immediate need for a talented Senior Kafka Administrator. This is a 06+ Month contract opportunity with long-term potential and is located in Denver, CO /
St. Louis, MO (Onsite).

Pay Range: $50/hr - $55/hr employee benefits include, but are not limited to, health insurance (medical, dental, vision), 401(k) plan, and paid sick leave (depending on work location).

• Own and evolve the on-prem event streaming platform with a primary focus on Confluent Platform.
• Lead planning and execution of a hardware refresh for on-prem clusters.
• Drive reliability and performance while embedding Dev Ops/automation across provisioning, deployment, observability, and incident response.
• Design, deploy, and operate highly available Kafka clusters (on-prem, cloud, and/or managed services).
• 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, and REST Proxy.
• Conduct performance tuning, throughput testing, and benchmarking.
• Develop operational documentation, including standards, runbooks, and monitoring configurations.
• Facilitate knowledge transfer sessions and documentation handoff at project milestones.

• Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK operations and integration.
• Experience executing hardware refreshes or major cluster rebuilds/migrations with minimal downtime.
• 5+ years in systems/platform engineering, SRE, or Dev Ops; 4 years operating Kafka in production at scale.
• Deep knowledge of Kafka internals: partitions, replication, retention/compaction, rebalance strategies.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and Mirror Maker/Confluent Replicator.
• Strong Linux fundamentals and networking skills (TCP, DNS, load balancing).
• Proficiency in automation/scripting.
• Experience with monitoring/observability tools such as Data Dog, Grafana, and JMX exporters.
• Proven ability to produce clear, comprehensive documentation.

Our client is a leading IT Industry and we are currently interviewing to fill this and other similar contract positions.

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