Kafka Administrator; Ansible

Administer production Confluent Kafka environments and build the Ansible automation that deploys, secures, and monitors them.

• Administer production Confluent Kafka clusters — brokers, Zoo Keeper/KRaft, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, KSQL, and Control Center
• Deploy, configure, upgrade, and patch clusters through idempotent Ansible playbooks, roles, and modules
• Orchestrate workflows, scheduling, credentials, and RBAC in Ansible Tower/AWX, integrated with CI/CD and Git
• Implement Kafka security including SSL/TLS, SASL, RBAC, and MDS, with secrets managed through Ansible Vault
• Architect and maintain observability on Prometheus, Thanos, and Grafana, including dashboards, alerting, and HA configuration
• Troubleshoot replication, partitioning, consumer lag, and performance issues using observability data
• Manage topic lifecycle and connector integrations (IBM MQ, JDBC, Datagen)
• Convert manual processes into automated workflows and coach engineering teams on automation practice

• Bachelor's degree plus 7 years of experience
• Proven Ansible automation of Kafka deployment and operations, including custom roles and modules
• Ansible Tower/AWX experience in an enterprise setting
• Strong Python and Bash scripting
• Hands-on Linux — SELinux, systemd, permissions, and networking
• Prometheus, Thanos, and Grafana for monitoring distributed systems
• Ability to obtain and maintain a federal Public Trust suitability determination

• Confluent Cloud or hybrid Kafka architectures
• KRaft mode and migration from Zoo Keeper
• Kubernetes-based Kafka deployments (Strimzi, Confluent Operator)
• Performance tuning across I/O, JVM, and networking
• AWS, Azure, or Gov Cloud; federal compliance and security frameworks