Kafka Engineer/Administrator (Apache Kafka)

Location: Onsite in Denver, CO, US; participation in an on-call rotation is required.

Company

Work with a multinational telecom technology company through hirify.global.

What you will do

• Design, deploy, configure, upgrade, and maintain highly available Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform clusters across production and non-production environments.
• Monitor broker performance, replication, partition balance, throughput, storage, consumer lag, connector status, and platform health; troubleshoot incidents and tune reliability and performance.
• Build and support topics, partitions, replication policies, schemas, service accounts, and Kafka Connect integrations, including Amazon S3, Trino, and OpenSearch connectors.
• Implement TLS, SASL, ACL, RBAC, secrets management, auditability, and certificate lifecycle controls.
• Automate provisioning, scaling, upgrades, patching, and operational tasks with Terraform, Ansible, Git-based CI/CD pipelines, and Python or shell scripting.
• Plan and test backup, recovery, failover, cross-cluster replication, and disaster recovery; lead production troubleshooting, root cause analysis, documentation, and coordination with application, infrastructure, vendor, and cloud support teams.

Requirements

• 3+ years of hands-on experience administering enterprise Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform environments, including production cluster design, capacity planning, upgrades, patching, performance tuning, and lifecycle management.
• 3+ years of experience troubleshooting complex Kafka issues involving broker availability, replication, partitioning, rebalancing, consumer lag, throughput, latency, storage, and Kafka Connect task failures.
• 3+ years of experience automating infrastructure and platform operations with Terraform and Ansible, supported by Git-based CI/CD pipelines and Python or shell scripting.
• Experience designing and supporting highly available Kafka architectures, including cross-cluster replication, failover, backup, recovery, and disaster recovery testing.
• Deep understanding of Kafka security and governance, including TLS, SASL, ACLs, RBAC, Schema Registry compatibility, service accounts, credential management, and audit controls.
• Experience designing and operating observability capabilities with Prometheus, Grafana, Confluent Control Center, OpenSearch, or equivalent solutions, including actionable dashboards and alert thresholds.
• Ability to define engineering standards, advise application teams on producer and consumer patterns, review platform designs, and lead technical resolution across multiple teams.
• Excellent client-facing communication, technical documentation, incident leadership, root cause analysis, and consulting skills in English.
• Ability to work in the office, participate in an on-call rotation, and collaborate with senior client resources and vendor support teams.

Culture & Benefits

• One-year contract engagement.
• Onsite work in Denver, Colorado.
• Participation in a production on-call rotation.
• Collaboration with application teams, infrastructure teams, incident managers, vendors, cloud support personnel, and senior client resources.

Hiring process

• Contact hirify.global to learn more about the opportunity.