KAFKA ADMIN

MACHINE LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES LLC; Phoenix (AZ); On-site; USD 97,000 - 138,000; Full time

Job summary

MACHINE LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES LLC is seeking a senior contract Kafka/Confluent administrator to own and evolve our on-prem event streaming platform. You will lead hardware refresh planning, drive reliability and performance, and embed DevOps practices across provisioning, deployment, observability, and incident response.

Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK is desired for cross-environment alignment, with comprehensive documentation and runbooks required for deliverables.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in systems/platform engineering, SRE, or DevOps.
• 4+ years operating Kafka in production at scale.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and operate highly available Kafka clusters (on-prem, cloud, or managed services).
• Manage topics, partitions, quotas, retention policies, and consumer group strategies.
• Own upgrades, patches, and migrations.
• Implement and manage Kafka components: Connect, Schema Registry, Replicator, REST Proxy; knowledge of Streams/ksqlDB is a plus.
• Performance tuning, throughput testing, and benchmarking.
• Capacity planning and cluster right-sizing.

Skills

Kafka administration

SRE/DevOps

Linux fundamentals

Automation scripting

Monitoring (DataDog Grafana)

DR and multi-region design

Tools

Kafka Connect

Schema Registry

Mirror Maker/Confluent Replicator

REST Proxy

Kafka Streams/ksqlDB

Job description

Job Overview

Job ID: J53587

Job Title: KAFKA ADMIN

Location: PHOENIX, AZ

Duration: 6 Months + Extension

Domain Exposure: Telecom

Work Authorization: US Citizen,Green Card,OPT-EAD,CPT,H-1B,H4-EAD,L2-EAD,GC-EAD

Client: To Be Discussed Later

Employment Type: W-2, 1099, C2C

Job Details

Bill Rate: $85/hour

Job Type: C2C/1099 Contract

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.

Contract Deliverables

• 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.

Equal Opportunity Employer

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.