Kafka Admin

Ampstek; St. Louis (MO); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

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

Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK is desirable for cross-environment alignment.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of Kafka administration and architecture experience.
• Strong on-prem and cloud deployment familiarity.
• Proven ability to design reliable, scalable streaming platforms.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and operate highly available Kafka clusters (on-prem, cloud, and 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, MirrorMaker, Replicator, REST Proxy.

Skills

Apache Kafka

Confluent Platform

Automation

DevOps

Observability

Incident response

Performance tuning

Tools

Kafka Connect

Schema Registry

MirrorMaker

Confluent Replicator

Job description

About the Engagement: 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, MirrorMaker/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.

Partitioning strategy, and cluster right-sizing.

Minimum years of experience: 10+ years