Senior - Database Administrator

Darwinbox Digital Solutions Pvt. Ltd.; India; On-site; INR 180,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Darwinbox Digital Solutions Pvt. Ltd. is seeking a Kafka administrator to manage enterprise Kafka clusters in India. You will install, configure, monitor, and upgrade Kafka, ensure security with SSL/TLS and SASL, and support producers/consumers and incident response. Strong scripting and Linux skills are required.

You will collaborate with engineering teams to onboard new use cases, tune performance, and maintain runbooks and inventories for reliable streaming operations.

Qualifications

• Hands-on Kafka administration in production environments.
• Experience with cluster installation, configuration, administration, maintenance, and upgrades.
• Strong knowledge of topics, partitions, replication, brokers, producers, consumers, offsets, and consumer groups.

Responsibilities

• Install, configure, administer, maintain, and upgrade Apache Kafka clusters across enterprise environments.
• Monitor Kafka platform health, availability, capacity, and performance; troubleshoot platform issues and implement tuning recommendations.
• Create, configure, and manage Kafka topics, partitions, replication factors, retention settings, and other resources.
• Manage producers, consumers, offsets, and consumer groups to support reliable message processing.
• Implement and maintain Kafka security using SSL/TLS, SASL, and ACLs.
• Support production Kafka environments, participate in incident troubleshooting, perform root-cause analysis, and assist with service restoration.
• Analyze logs to identify and resolve production issues; perform routine maintenance, patching, upgrades, and capacity planning.
• Support high availability, replication, resiliency, backup/recovery, and disaster recovery for streaming platforms.
• Use Linux/Unix administration and shell scripting to automate tasks and support operations.
• Maintain runbooks, configuration standards, troubleshooting procedures, and platform inventories.

Skills

Kafka cluster installation

Monitoring & troubleshooting

Consumer group management

Kafka security - SSL/TLS, SASL, ACLs

Linux/Unix scripting

Production support

Education

Bachelor's degree in IT/CS

Tools

Confluent Kafka

Prometheus

Grafana

CI/CD tooling

IaC / automation tooling

Job description

Asapplicable based on functional alignment

Responsibilities

• Install, configure, administer, maintain, and upgrade Apache Kafka clusters across enterprise environments.
• Monitor Kafka platform health, availability, capacity, and performance; troubleshootplatform issues and implement performance-tuning recommendations.
• Create, configure, and manage Kafka topics, partitions, replication factors, retentionsettings, and other cluster resources.
• Manage and troubleshoot producers, consumers, offsets, and consumer groups to support reliable message processing.
• Implement and maintain Kafka security using SSL/TLS, SASL, and Access Control Lists(ACLs).
• Support production Kafka environments, participate in incident troubleshooting, performroot-cause analysis, and assist with service restoration.
• Analyze Kafka, broker, operating-system, and application logs to identify and resolveproduction issues.
• Perform routine platform maintenance, patching, upgrades, capacity planning, and operational health checks.
• Support high availability, replication, resiliency, backup/recovery, and disaster-recovery requirements for streaming platforms.
• Use Linux/Unix administration and Shell scripting to support platform operations and automate repetitive administrative tasks.
• Maintain operational documentation, runbooks, configuration standards, troubleshooting procedures, and platform inventories.
• Collaborate with application and engineering teams to onboard new Kafka use cases and resolve platform integration issues.
• Support Kafka environments using ZooKeeper and/or KRaft architecture and participate in platform modernization activities.

Education & Experience

• 4-8 years of overall Information Technology experience.
• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka administration in production or enterprise environments.
• Experience with Kafka cluster installation, configuration, administration, maintenance,and upgrades.
• Strong knowledge of Kafka topics, partitions, replication, brokers, producers,consumers, offsets, and consumer groups.
• Experience monitoring, troubleshooting, and performance tuning Kafka clusters andstreaming workloads.
• Hands-on knowledge of Kafka security, including SSL/TLS, SASL authentication, and ACLbased authorization.
• Working knowledge of Linux/Unix environments and Shell scripting.
• Experience supporting production systems and troubleshooting incidents in businesscritical environments.
• Knowledge of Apache Zookeeper and Kafka KRaft architecture.
• Effective written and verbal communication skills and the ability to collaborate across technical teams.

Must Have Skills

• Kafka cluster installation, configuration, administration, and upgrades
• Monitoring, troubleshooting, and performance tuning
• Topics, partitions, replication, and consumer group management
• Kafka security - SSL/TLS, SASL, and ACLs
• Linux/Unix and Shell scripting
• Production support and incident troubleshooting

Nice to Have Skills

• Hands-on experience with Confluent Kafka or Confluent Platform.
• Experience with Kafka Connect and connector administration.
• Experience with Prometheus and Grafana for Kafka monitoring, metrics, dashboards,and alerting.
• Experience with automation, CI/CD, Infrastructure-as-Code, or scripting used to operate streaming platforms.