Kafka Engineer – Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform

Location: Denver, CO (Onsite 4 Days per Week)
Employment Type: Contract

Job Description

Client is seeking an experienced Kafka Engineer to support a multinational telecommunications technology leader in Denver, Colorado. This role focuses on designing, implementing, securing, and maintaining enterprise-scale Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform environments that support mission-critical, real-time data streaming and integration.

The ideal candidate will have strong hands-on experience in Kafka cluster administration, platform automation, high availability, disaster recovery, security, and performance optimization. You will work closely with application, data, infrastructure, and cloud engineering teams to ensure platform reliability, scalability, and operational excellence.

This position requires onsite work in Denver, CO, four days per week, along with participation in an on-call rotation.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, configure, and maintain highly available Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform clusters across production and non-production environments.
• Monitor and optimize Kafka broker health, replication, partition distribution, throughput, latency, storage utilization, and consumer lag.
• Troubleshoot complex Kafka infrastructure issues, including broker failures, replication problems, consumer rebalancing, performance bottlenecks, and Kafka Connect failures.
• Manage Kafka topics, partitions, schemas, Schema Registry, and Kafka Connect integrations.
• Configure and support connectors and integrations involving Amazon S3, Trino, OpenSearch, and related data platforms.
• Implement Kafka security controls, including TLS encryption, SASL authentication, ACLs, RBAC, service accounts, certificate management, and secrets management.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, cluster upgrades, patching, scaling, and routine operational tasks using Terraform, Ansible, Python, and shell scripting.
• Develop and maintain Git-based CI/CD pipelines to support repeatable deployments and reliable platform lifecycle management.
• Design, implement, and test high-availability architectures, cross-cluster replication, failover, backup, recovery, and disaster recovery procedures.
• Build and maintain monitoring, alerting, and observability solutions using Prometheus, Grafana, Confluent Control Center, OpenSearch, or equivalent tools.
• Establish operational standards, define best practices, and advise application teams on Kafka producer, consumer, and integration patterns.
• Participate in on-call support, incident response, root cause analysis, and continuous service improvement.
• Maintain technical documentation, architecture diagrams, operational runbooks, and troubleshooting procedures.
• Collaborate with client stakeholders, infrastructure teams, vendors, and cloud support teams to resolve complex technical challenges.

Required Qualifications

• 3+ years of hands-on experience administering enterprise Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform environments.
• 3+ years of experience troubleshooting Kafka production issues involving broker availability, replication, partitioning, consumer lag, rebalancing, throughput, latency, storage, and Kafka Connect.
• 3+ years of experience automating infrastructure and platform operations using Terraform and Ansible, with Git-based CI/CD pipelines and Python or shell scripting.
• Strong experience designing and operating 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 implementing monitoring, dashboards, alerting, and observability using Prometheus, Grafana, Confluent Control Center, OpenSearch, or comparable technologies.
• Experience with Kafka Connect and connector integrations, preferably involving Amazon S3, Trino, and OpenSearch.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, event streaming, cluster capacity planning, performance tuning, upgrades, patching, and platform lifecycle management.
• Ability to establish engineering standards, review architecture designs, mentor application teams, and lead technical troubleshooting across multiple teams.
• Excellent English communication, client-facing consulting, technical documentation, incident management, and root cause analysis skills.
• Ability to work onsite in Denver, CO, four days per week, and participate in an on-call rotation.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting enterprise-scale Kafka deployments in telecommunications or other mission-critical environments.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and infrastructure-as-code best practices.
• Familiarity with enterprise data platforms, real-time data pipelines, and distributed application architectures.
• Experience working directly with vendors and cloud support teams to resolve production incidents.