Kafka Operations Administrator

Kafka Operations Administrator

Production-grade Apache Kafka operations experience, managing, maintaining and upgrading Kafka clusters in production environments with a focus on high availability, disaster recovery, fail-over and overall reliability. Kafka ecosystem tooling experience:
Kafka Connect, Schema Registry. Proficiency in installing and configuring monitoring systems using Grafana (building dashboards), Prometheus, JMX metrics and Splunk. Automation and orchestration experience:
Terraform, Ansible, Helm, Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE) or equivalent. Scripting and tooling experience:
Python or Bash for automation and runbooks. Strong Linux system administration experience, including troubleshooting, automation and scripting for efficient infrastructure management. Knowledge of networking concepts across on-prem VMs and cloud environments, ensuring seamless integration and communication between services. Strong understanding of topic management and security best practices for streaming platforms: TLS, ACLs, RBAC, encryption at rest/in transit. Experience participating in 24x7 on-call rotations, JVM tuning, GC Analysis, network and disk I/O diagnostics and documenting incidents/postmortems.

Experience in TCP/IP, routing, switching and firewall configurations relevant to Kafka operations. Good to Have:
Deep Kafka performance tuning and capacity planning experience. Knowledge of message delivery semantics and guarantees (at-least-once, exactly-once). Cloud-native security/compliance experience (IAM, VPC, KMS, Security Groups).

Certifications:

Confluent Certified Administrator, AWS/Azure/GCP certifications. Experience with Apache Kafka in KRaft mode, including set up, configuration, troubleshooting and cluster management. Containerization and Container Orchestration Tools experience:
Docker, Kubernetes. Experience with CI/CD pipelines and Git-based workflows. Experience building custom Kafka connect libraries and understanding of data serialization formats (eg: Avro, JSON).