Kafka Administrator

About the Company

Prodapt is the largest specialized player in the Connectedness industry. As an AI-first strategic technology partner, Prodapt provides consulting, business reengineering, and managed services for the largest telecom and tech enterprises building networks and digital experiences of tomorrow. A ServiceNow-invested company, Prodapt has been recognized by Gartner as a Large, Telecom-Native, Regional IT Service Provider. A “Great Place To Work® Certified™” company, Prodapt employs over 5,000 technology and domain experts across the Americas, Europe, India, Africa, & Japan. Prodapt is part of the 130-year-old business conglomerate The Jhaver Group, which employs over 32,000 people across 80+ locations globally.

About the Role

We are looking for Kafka Admin in Denver, CO.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, configure, upgrade, and maintain highly available, scalable Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform clusters for real-time data processing across production and non-production environments.
• Monitor platform health, broker performance, replication, partition balance, throughput, storage utilization, consumer lag, and connector status; troubleshoot incidents and tune the platform for reliability, performance, and minimal downtime.
• Build and support Kafka topics, partitions, replication policies, schemas, service accounts, and Kafka Connect integrations, including connectors for Amazon S3, Trino, and OpenSearch; assist application and data teams with producer and consumer integration.
• Implement and maintain platform security and compliance controls, including TLS encryption, SASL authentication, access control lists, role-based access control, secrets management, auditability, and secure certificate lifecycle practices.
• Automate cluster provisioning, configuration, scaling, upgrades, patching, and operational tasks using Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD pipelines, and Python or shell scripting.
• Plan and test backup, recovery, failover, cross-cluster replication, and disaster recovery procedures to support defined service-level objectives and business continuity requirements.
• Participate in production support and on-call rotation, lead technical troubleshooting, document root cause analyses, and coordinate resolution with application teams, infrastructure teams, incident managers, vendors, and cloud support personnel.
• Provide technical guidance on Kafka architecture and operational best practices; maintain runbooks, standards, diagrams, capacity plans, and support documentation; and remain current with Apache Kafka and Confluent capabilities.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of hands-on experience administering enterprise Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform environments, including production cluster design, capacity planning, upgrades, patching, performance tuning, and lifecycle management.
• Bachelors degree in Computer science, engineering or related field.
• 3+ years of experience troubleshooting complex Kafka issues involving broker availability, replication, partitioning, rebalance behavior, consumer lag, throughput, latency, storage, and Kafka Connect task failures.
• 3+ years of experience automating infrastructure and platform operations with Terraform and Ansible, supported by Git-based CI/CD pipelines and Python or shell scripting.
• Demonstrated experience designing and supporting 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 designing and operating observability capabilities using Prometheus, Grafana, Confluent Control Center, OpenSearch, or equivalent solutions, including actionable dashboards and alert thresholds.
• Proven ability to define engineering standards, advise application teams on producer and consumer patterns, review platform designs, and lead technical resolution across multiple teams.
• Proven excellence in client-facing communication, technical documentation, incident leadership, root cause analysis, and consulting skills in English.
• Ability to work in office, participate in an on-call rotation, and collaborate with senior client resources and vendor support teams.

Required Skills

• Hands-on administration of enterprise Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform environments.
• Production cluster design, capacity planning, upgrades, patching, performance tuning, and lifecycle management.
• Troubleshooting complex Kafka issues involving broker availability, replication, partitioning, rebalance behavior, consumer lag, throughput, latency, storage, and Kafka Connect task failures.
• Automation of infrastructure and platform operations with Terraform and Ansible.
• Use of Git-based CI/CD pipelines and Python or shell scripting.
• Design and support of highly available Kafka architectures, including cross-cluster replication, failover, backup, recovery, and disaster recovery testing.
• Kafka security and governance, including TLS, SASL, ACLs, RBAC, Schema Registry compatibility, service accounts, credential management, and audit controls.
• Design and operation of observability capabilities using Prometheus, Grafana, Confluent Control Center, OpenSearch, or equivalent solutions, including actionable dashboards and alert thresholds.
• Definition of engineering standards and advising application teams on producer and consumer patterns.
• Client-facing communication, technical documentation, incident leadership, root cause analysis, and consulting skills in English.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with Confluent Platform or Confluent Cloud components such as KRaft or ZooKeeper, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Control Center, Cluster Linking, and stream-processing capabilities.
• Experience operating Kafka on AWS, Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, or another cloud or container platform; AWS Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) experience is beneficial.
• Experience with GitLab, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Argo CD, or comparable CI/CD and GitOps tooling.
• Experience integrating Kafka with Amazon S3, Trino, OpenSearch, relational databases, IBM MQ, data warehouses, or other enterprise source and sink systems.
• Familiarity with data governance, schema evolution, topic naming and retention standards, capacity forecasting, service-level objectives, and platform cost optimization.
• Relevant certification or formal training in Apache Kafka, Confluent, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, or related technologies.