Kafka Administrator

Position: Kafka Administrator

Location: Jersey City, NJ (Onsite)

Duration: Contract

Job Description:

We are seeking an experienced Kafka Administrator to manage, maintain, and optimize Apache Kafka clusters in a high-availability, enterprise environment. The ideal candidate will be responsible for Kafka infrastructure administration, performance tuning, monitoring, security, troubleshooting, and supporting real-time data streaming applications.

Key Responsibilities

• Install, configure, and administer Apache Kafka clusters across development, testing, and production environments.
• Manage Kafka brokers, topics, partitions, replication, and consumer groups.
• Monitor Kafka cluster health, performance, and capacity planning.
• Perform cluster upgrades, patching, and maintenance activities with minimal downtime.
• Configure and maintain Kafka security features including SSL/TLS, SASL, ACLs, and authentication mechanisms.
• Troubleshoot broker, producer, consumer, and connectivity issues.
• Implement disaster recovery, backup, and high-availability strategies.
• Manage and support Kafka ecosystem tools such as Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker, and KSQL/ksqlDB.
• Automate Kafka administration tasks using scripting and Infrastructure-as-Code tools.
• Collaborate with application, DevOps, cloud, and data engineering teams.
• Create operational documentation, runbooks, and standard operating procedures.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
• 3 years of experience administering Apache Kafka in production environments.
• Strong understanding of Kafka architecture, brokers, partitions, replication, and consumer groups.
• Experience with Linux/Unix administration.
• Knowledge of ZooKeeper (for legacy Kafka deployments) and KRaft architecture.
• Experience with monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Splunk, or Datadog.
• Proficiency in shell scripting, Python, or automation tools.
• Understanding of networking concepts, TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing, and firewalls.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Knowledge of containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.