Kafka Engineer/Admin, Real-Time Data Platform
Overview
Own the design, deployment, and scaling of Kafka clusters in mission-critical environments. Support the Linux-based infrastructure that forms the foundation of our real-time data platform. Collaborate with data engineering and platform teams to ensure high availability and security. This role drives the platform's core messaging backbone, ensuring zero-downtime operations and secure access controls.
What You'll Do8
- 1Design and implement highly available Kafka clusters in production, ensuring fault tolerance and scalability.
- 2Perform Kafka upgrades and patching with minimal downtime, executing rolling restarts and verifying broker health.
- 3Administer security protocols and access controls across Kafka clusters, including TLS, SASL, and ACLs.
- 4Monitor cluster health, detect and resolve issues using JMX, Prometheus, and Grafana.
- 5Tune Kafka configurations to optimize throughput and latency, adjusting broker, producer, and consumer settings.
- 6Automate cluster provisioning and management using Ansible or Terraform.
- 7Manage Linux servers, including OS upgrades, security patching, and system performance tuning.
- 8Collaborate with data engineering to design topics, partitions, and replication factors for new use cases.
Requirements9
- 13+ years hands-on experience administering Kafka and Zookeeper in production.
- 2Strong Linux administration skills, including RHEL or CentOS.
- 3Experience with TLS, SASL, and ACLs in Kafka.
- 4Proficiency in scripting with Bash or Python for automation.
- 5Familiarity with Kafka Streams or KSQL is a plus.
- 6Hands-on with Apache ZooKeeper or KRaft mode for metadata management.
- 7Experience with Confluent Platform or Apache Kafka distributions.
- 8Knowledge of monitoring tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and JMX.
- 9Understanding of network protocols and security best practices.
Salary Insight
$125 - $146k per year
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