What are the responsibilities and job description for the Apache Kafka engineer position at Droisys?
Droisys is an innovation technology company focused on helping companies accelerate their digital initiatives from strategy and planning through execution. We leverage deep technical expertise, Agile methodologies, and data-driven intelligence to modernize systems of engagement and simplify human/tech interaction.At Droisys, we invest in our talent and support career growth, and we are always on the lookout for amazing talent who can contribute to our growth by delivering top results for our clients. Join us to challenge yourself and accomplish work that matters.
Here are the job details
Hiring: Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator
Location: Denver, CO and St. Louis, MO (Onsite)
Experience: 12 Years
⏳ Duration: Long-term contract
Rate: $55-60/hr C2C
Openings: 2 Roles
About the Role
We are migrating a portfolio of Apache Kafka clusters from on-premises platforms (Cloudera and Confluent) to AWS MSK, managed through a CI/CD pipeline built on Terraform and GitLab. We are looking for a senior, hands-on Kafka engineer to own day-to-day Kafka administration across both environments, drive the migration, and coordinate closely with producer and consumer application teams to ensure a smooth, low-risk cutover. This is a senior individual-contributor role for someone who has run Kafka at scale in production, is comfortable in a hybrid on-prem/cloud world and can act as the technical point of contact between platform and application teams.
Required Qualifications
- 5 years in data/platform/infrastructure engineering, with 4 years operating Apache Kafka in production.
- Hands-on administration experience with Cloudera and Confluent Platform.
- Production experience with AWS MSK (provisioning, configuration, IAM auth, networking).
- Proven experience migrating Kafka workloads to the cloud with minimal disruption.
- Strong Terraform and GitLab CI/CD experience for infrastructure automation.
- Hands-on Datadog experience for monitoring, dashboards, and alerting.
- Deep understanding of Kafka internals: partitions, replication, ISR, offsets, consumer groups, and delivery semantics.
- Solid AWS fundamentals: VPC, security groups, IAM, KMS, CloudWatch, PrivateLink.
- Strong Linux, networking, and scripting skills (Bash, Python).
- Excellent communication and coordination skills to work across producer/consumer teams.
Preferred / Nice to Have
- Experience with MirrorMaker 2, Confluent Replicator, or cluster linking for replication/migration.
- Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, and ksqlDB experience.
- Kafka Streams or Flink familiarity.
- Kubernetes / EKS experience (e.g., Strimzi).
- Certifications: Confluent Certified Administrator, AWS Solutions Architect/DevOps.
- Experience in a regulated or large enterprise environment.
Droisys is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status or any other characteristic protected by law. Droisys believes in diversity, inclusion, and belonging, and we are committed to fostering a diverse work environment.
Salary : $55 - $60