Kafka Engineer/Administrator

Job Title: Kafka Engineer/Administrator
The full job description covers all associated skills, previous experience, and any qualifications that applicants are expected to have.
Location : Englewood, CO (near Fiddler's Green Circle, Denver metro) / Maryland Heights, MO (Riverport Dr, St. Louis metro) - OnsiteDuration:: 6+ monthsInterview: Virtual
Skills Required:This is a hands-on platform admin role for self-managed Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform.Candidates who have only used Kafka as developers, or only worked with managed Amazon MSK, will not be considered.Must have (3+ years each):Production administration of enterprise Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform: cluster design, capacity planning, upgrades, patching, performance tuningTroubleshooting broker availability, replication, partitioning, rebalances, consumer lag, throughput/latency, and Kafka Connect task failuresAutomating platform operations with Terraform and Ansible, Git-based CI/CD, and Python or shell scriptingDesigning and supporting HA Kafka architectures: cross-cluster replication, failover, backup/recovery, DR testingKafka security and governance: TLS, SASL, ACLs, RBAC, Schema Registry, service accounts, audit controlsObservability with Prometheus, Grafana, Confluent Control Center, or OpenSearchStrong client-facing communication, incident xzbcwsv leadership, RCA, and documentationAble to work onsite and join an on-call rotationConfluent components: KRaft, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Control Center, Cluster LinkingKafka on AWS, Kubernetes, or OpenShift; Amazon MSKGitLab, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or Argo CDConnect integrations to S3, Trino, OpenSearch, relational DBs, IBM MQKafka, Confluent, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, or Ansible certifications