What are the responsibilities and job description for the Kafka Engineer/Administrator position at Holistic Partners, Inc?
Job Title: Kafka Engineer/Administrator
Location : Englewood, CO (near Fiddler's Green Circle, Denver metro) / Maryland Heights, MO (Riverport Dr, St. Louis metro) - Onsite
Duration:: 6 months
Interview: Virtual
Skills Required:
- This is a hands-on platform admin role for self-managed Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform.
- Candidates who have only used Kafka as developers, or only worked with managed Amazon MSK, will not be considered.
- Must have (3 years each):
- Production administration of enterprise Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform: cluster design, capacity planning, upgrades, patching, performance tuning
- Troubleshooting broker availability, replication, partitioning, rebalances, consumer lag, throughput/latency, and Kafka Connect task failures
- Automating platform operations with Terraform and Ansible, Git-based CI/CD, and Python or shell scripting
- Designing and supporting HA Kafka architectures: cross-cluster replication, failover, backup/recovery, DR testing
- Kafka security and governance: TLS, SASL, ACLs, RBAC, Schema Registry, service accounts, audit controls
- Observability with Prometheus, Grafana, Confluent Control Center, or OpenSearch
- Strong client-facing communication, incident leadership, RCA, and documentation
- Able to work onsite and join an on-call rotation
- Confluent components: KRaft, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Control Center, Cluster Linking
- Kafka on AWS, Kubernetes, or OpenShift; Amazon MSK
- GitLab, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or Argo CD
- Connect integrations to S3, Trino, OpenSearch, relational DBs, IBM MQ
- Kafka, Confluent, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, or Ansible certifications