Kafka Developer

Role: Kafka Administrator (Confluent Platform) Location: New York City, NY - 10004, Day one onsite (3 days on-site per week)- – Non locals will work from EST/CST Job Responsibilities • Deploy, configure, and maintain Confluent Kafka clusters in a highly available production environment. • Execute Kafka upgrades and patching with minimal downtime and smooth transitions. • Administer security protocols and access controls to protect the platform and data. • Monitor cluster health and performance using the organization’s monitoring stack (Prometheus, Grafana) and respond to anomalies. • Troubleshoot and resolve cluster-related incidents (e.g., broker outages, replication lag, partition reassignment, data loss risks). • Develop and enhance automation scripts to streamline operational tasks and reduce manual interventions. • Assist with capacity planning and resource management to support future growth (topics, partitions, quotas, and hardware requirements). • Collaborate with SRE/DevOps, data engineers, and application teams to optimize data pipelines and performance. Qualifications • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or an equivalent combination of education and experience. • 5+ years of Kafka administration experience, preferably with Confluent Platform in production environments. • Proven expertise in Kafka upgrades, production troubleshooting, and incident response. • Strong background in Linux system administration. • Proficiency in Python and/or Bash scripting for automation and tooling. • Solid understanding of Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring and observability; experience creating dashboards and alerts. • Familiarity with security best practices for Kafka (ACLs, Kerberos/SASL, TLS) is a plus. • Confluent Kafka certification is advantageous. Nice-to-have • Experience with Kafka Connect, KSQL/ksqlDB, and Schema Registry. • Familiarity with cloud deployments (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform). • Knowledge of data governance and compliance considerations related to streaming platforms.