Job Purpose:
The Kafka Streaming Platform Administrator is responsible for administering, securing, monitoring, and optimizing Apache Kafka environments to ensure the availability, scalability, performance, and resilience of enterprise event-streaming platforms. The role supports real-time data integration and streaming workloads by managing Kafka infrastructure, disaster recovery capabilities, capacity planning, platform security, and operational excellence in highly available and regulated environments.
Key Accountabilities:
Administer, configure, monitor, and maintain Apache Kafka clusters across production and non-production environments. Manage Kafka brokers, topics, partitions, replication factors, retention policies, and cluster performance settings. Implement and maintain platform security controls including TLS encryption, SASL authentication, ACLs, and Kerberos integration. Monitor platform health and availability using observability and monitoring solutions and proactively resolve performance bottlenecks. Configure and maintain monitoring, alerting, logging, and operational dashboards for real-time visibility into platform performance. Plan and execute disaster recovery strategies, backup procedures, multi-cluster replication, and failover testing activities. Perform cluster capacity planning, scaling, performance tuning, upgrades, patching, and maintenance activities. Develop and maintain operational procedures, runbooks, troubleshooting guides, and recovery documentation. Support incident management, root cause analysis (RCA), problem management, and service improvement initiatives. Collaborate with application teams, data engineers, architects, and infrastructure teams to onboard new workloads and optimize cluster utilization. Ensure compliance with security, governance, audit, and operational standards. Support automation initiatives to improve platform deployment, monitoring, and operational efficiency. Contribute to continuous improvement initiatives to enhance platform stability, scalability, and reliability.
Minimum Qualifications:
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Computer Engineering, or a related field. Confluent Certified Administrator for Apache Kafka or equivalent certification. Additional certifications in Cloud, Linux Administration, Kubernetes, or Data Platforms.
Minimum Experience:
+4 years of experience administering and supporting Apache Kafka production environments. Proven experience managing Kafka clusters in high-availability and mission-critical environments. Experience in security hardening, monitoring, performance tuning, disaster recovery, and operational support. Experience within banking, financial services, fintech, telecommunications, or other regulated industries. Hands-on experience with enterprise-scale event streaming and real-time data integration platforms.
Job-Specific Skills:
Apache Kafka Administration and Operations. Kafka Cluster Provisioning, Configuration, and Scaling. Topic, Partition, Replication, and Retention Management. Kafka Security (TLS, SASL, ACLs, Kerberos). Kafka Performance Tuning and Capacity Planning. Disaster Recovery and Multi-Cluster Replication. Mirror Maker and Cluster Linking. Monitoring and Observability Tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Confluent Control Center). Linux Server Administration. Shell Scripting and Automation. Networking Fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, Load Balancing, Network Security). Docker and Kubernetes Administration. Cloud Platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure). Incident Management and Root Cause Analysis (RCA). Backup, Recovery, and Business Continuity Planning. IT Operations and Platform Support. Strong troubleshooting and analytical skills. Documentation, reporting, and operational governance.