Description

Design, deploy, and operate highly available Kafka clusters for on-prem, cloud, and managed services.

This role is on-site.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and operate Kafka clusters (on-prem, cloud, or managed services like Confluent Cloud/AWS MSK).
• Manage topics, partitions, quotas, retention policies, and consumer group strategies for performance and cost.
• Implement and manage Kafka components including Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker/Replicator, and REST Proxy.
• Own upgrades, patches, migrations, and capacity planning including hardware refresh plans and cluster right-sizing.
• Produce operational documentation, runbooks, monitoring configurations, and DR playbooks.

Required Skills

• 5+ years in systems/platform engineering, SRE, or DevOps with 4+ years operating Kafka in production at scale.
• Deep knowledge of Kafka internals: partitions, replication, retention, compaction, and rebalance strategies.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and MirrorMaker/Confluent Replicator.
• Strong Linux fundamentals, networking (TCP, DNS, load balancing), and performance analysis.
• Proficiency in automation and scripting.
• Monitoring and observability using DataDog, Grafana, JMX exporters, and log aggregation.
• Experience with disaster recovery, multi-region design, and incident management.

Preferred Skills

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

Key Skills

Education

Bachelor's degree