Our client, a multinational telecom technology company, is looking for a Kafka Engineer.

This Role will be onsite in Denver, CO.

Key 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.

If you would like to learn more about this opportunity, please reach out to Elite Technical.

Required Skills

Required Skills:

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.

• 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.