KAFKA ADMIN

Valiant Technologies LLC; Phoenix (AZ); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Valiant Technologies LLC in the United States seeks a senior contract Kafka/Confluent administrator to own and evolve our on prem event streaming platform with a focus on Confluent Platform. You will lead planning and execution of a hardware refresh for on prem clusters, drive reliability and performance, and embed DevOps automation across provisioning, deployment, observability, and incident response.

Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK is desired for secondary support and

Qualifications

• 5+ years in systems/platform engineering, SRE, or DevOps; 4+ years operating Kafka in production at scale.
• Deep knowledge of Kafka internals: partitions, replication, retention/compaction, rebalance strategies.
• Hands-on with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Mirror Maker/Confluent Replicator.
• Strong Linux fundamentals; networking (TCP, DNS, load balancing), and performance analysis.
• Proficiency in automation/scripting.
• Monitoring/observability: Datadog, Grafana, JMX exporters, and log aggregation.
• Experience with DR, multi-region design, and incident management.
• Proven ability to produce clear, comprehensive documentation

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and operate highly available Kafka clusters (on-prem, cloud, and/or managed services).
• Manage topics, partitions, quotas, retention policies, and consumer group strategies.
• Own upgrades, patches, and migrations.
• Implement and manage Kafka components: Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Mirror Maker/Confluent Replicator; familiarity with Kafka Streams and ksqlDB is a plus.
• Performance tuning, throughput testing, and benchmarking.
• Capacity planning, partitioning strategy, and cluster right-sizing.
• Hardware refresh plan: capacity model, sizing, diagrams, migration strategy, risk register.
• Implement and validated on-prem clusters on refreshed hardware with benchmarks.
• Operational documentation: runbooks, monitoring/alerts, backup/DR playbooks.
• Knowledge transfer and documentation handoff at milestones and project close.

Skills

Kafka admin

SRE/DevOps

Linux fundamentals

Networking

Automation scripting

Monitoring

Disaster recovery

Documentation

Tools

Kafka Connect

Schema Registry

Mirror Maker/Replicator

Datadog

Grafana

JMX exporters

Job description

Work Authorization: USC, GC, H-1B, OPT-EAD, GC-EAD, H4-EAD

Job Summary

We’re seeking a senior contract Kafka/Confluent administrator to own and evolve our on prem event streaming platform, with a primary focus on Confluent Platform. You will lead planning and execution of a hardware refresh for our on prem clusters, drive reliability and performance, and embed DevOps/automation across provisioning, deployment, observability, and incident response. Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK is desired for secondary support and cross environment alignment. Comprehensive documentation and runbooks are required deliverables.

Kafka Platform Support Key Responsibilities:

• Design, deploy, and operate highly available Kafka clusters (on-prem, cloud, and/or managed services such as Confluent Cloud or AWS MSK).
• Manage topics, partitions, quotas, retention policies, and consumer group strategies for performance and cost.
• Own upgrades, patches, and migrations.
• Implement and manage Kafka components: Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Mirror Maker/Confluent Replicator, REST Proxy; familiarity with Kafka Streams and ksqlDB is a plus.
• Performance tuning (producers/consumers, batching, compression, acks, ISR, controller health), throughput testing, and benchmarking.
• Capacity planning, partitioning strategy, and cluster right-sizing.
• Hardware refresh plan: capacity model, sizing, architecture diagrams, migration/cutover strategy, risk register
• Implement and validated on-prem clusters on refreshed hardware with performance benchmarks
• Operational documentation: standards, runbooks, monitoring/alerts configuration, backup/restore and DR playbooks.
• Knowledge transfer sessions and documentation handoff at milestones and project close.

Minimum Qualifications:

• 5+ years in systems/platform engineering, SRE, or DevOps; 4+ years operating Kafka in production at scale.
• Deep knowledge of Kafka internals: partitions, replication, retention/compaction, rebalance strategies.
• Hands-on with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Mirror Maker/Confluent Replicator.
• Strong Linux fundamentals; networking (TCP, DNS, load balancing), and performance analysis.
• Proficiency in automation/scripting.
• Monitoring/observability: Data Dog, Grafana, JMX exporters, and log aggregation.
• Experience with DR, multi-region design, and incident management.
• Proven ability to produce clear, comprehensive documentation

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK operations and integration.
• Experience executing hardware refreshes mor major cluster rebuilds/migrations with minimal downtime.

We are an equal opportunity employer. All aspects of employment including the decision to hire, promote, discipline, or discharge, will be based on merit, competence, performance, and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, citizenship/ immigration status, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.