What are the responsibilities and job description for the Kafka Admin / Engineer position at Ampstek?
Job Title: Kafka Admin
Location: Denver, CO
Employment Type: Contract
About the Engagement: We're seeking a senior contract Kafka/Confluent administrator to own and evolve our on-prem event streaming platform, with a primary focus on Confluent Platform. You will lead planning and execution of a hardware refresh for our on-prem clusters, drive reliability and performance, and embed DevOps/automation across provisioning, deployment, observability, and incident response. Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK is desired for secondary support and cross-environment alignment. Comprehensive documentation and runbooks are required deliverables.
Kafka Platform Support Key Responsibilities
Design, deploy, and operate highly available Kafka clusters (on-prem, cloud, and/or managed services such as Confluent Cloud or AWS MSK).
Manage topics, partitions, quotas, retention policies, and consumer group strategies for performance and cost.
Own upgrades, patches, and migrations.
Implement and manage Kafka components: Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker/Confluent Replicator, REST Proxy; familiarity with Kafka Streams and ksqlDB is a plus.
Performance tuning (producers/consumers, batching, compression, acks, ISR, controller health), throughput testing, and benchmarking.
Partitioning strategy, and cluster right-sizing.
Thanks and regards
Tom@ampstek.com