Kafka Engineer / Administrator

Salesforce, Inc.; Denver (CO); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Salesforce, Inc. in Denver, CO, seeks a Kafka Engineer/Administrator to design, deploy, and manage high-availability Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform environments supporting real-time data processing across production and non-production systems.

Responsibilities include monitoring health and performance, securing the platform, building connectors (S3, Trino, OpenSearch), and automating tasks with Terraform and Ansible. On-site, collaboration with multiple teams is required.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of hands-on experience administering enterprise Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform environments.
• 3+ years troubleshooting complex Kafka issues including broker availability and consumer lag.
• 3+ years automating infrastructure with Terraform and Ansible, with Git-based CI/CD pipelines and Python or shell scripting.
• Experience designing highly available Kafka architectures including cross-cluster replication, failover, backup, recovery and disaster recovery testing.
• Deep knowledge of Kafka security, RBAC, TLS/SASL, ACLs, and audit controls.
• Experience building observability with Prometheus, Grafana, OpenSearch or similar, with dashboards and alerting.
• Ability to define engineering standards and lead cross-team technical resolutions.
• Strong client-facing communication, documentation and incident leadership in English.
• Willingness to work in an office, participate in on-call rotation, and collaborate with senior resources and vendor support teams.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, configure, upgrade, and maintain Kafka and Confluent Platform clusters for real-time data processing.
• Manage Kafka and Confluent Platform clusters across production and non-production environments.
• Monitor platform health, broker performance, replication, partition balance, throughput, storage, consumer lag and connector status; troubleshoot incidents and tune for reliability and performance.
• Build and support Kafka topics, partitions, replication policies, schemas, service accounts and Kafka Connect integrations (S3, Trino, OpenSearch).
• Implement and maintain platform security controls: TLS, SASL, ACLs, RBAC, secrets management, audits and certificate lifecycle.
• Automate provisioning, configuration, scaling, upgrades, patching and operational tasks with Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD and scripting.
• Plan and test backup, recovery, failover, cross-cluster replication and DR procedures to meet SLAs and business continuity.
• Participate in production support and on-call rotation; document root cause analyses and coordinate resolution with multiple teams and vendors.
• Provide technical guidance on Kafka architecture and best practices; maintain runbooks, diagrams, capacity plans and support documentation.

Skills

English communication

Incident leadership

Cross-team collaboration

Documentation

Problem solving

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

CI/CD pipelines

Python scripting

Shell scripting

Prometheus

Grafana

Confluent Platform

Kubernetes

AWS MSK

OpenSearch

Kafka Connect

Schema Registry

Job description

Kafka Engineer / Administrator, Denver, Colorado (Onsite)

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, deploy, configure, upgrade, and maintain highly available, scalable Apache
• Kafka and Confluent Platform clusters for real-time data processing across production
• and non-production environments.
• Monitor platform health, broker performance, replication, partition balance, throughput, storage utilization, consumer lag, and connector status; troubleshoot incidents and tune the platform for reliability, performance, and minimal downtime.
• Build and support Kafka topics, partitions, replication policies, schemas, service accounts, and Kafka Connect integrations, including connectors for Amazon S3, Trino, and OpenSearch; assist application and data teams with producer and consumer integration.
• Implement and maintain platform security and compliance controls, including TLS encryption, SASL authentication, access control lists, role-based access control, secrets management, auditability, and secure certificate lifecycle practices.
• Automate cluster provisioning, configuration, scaling, upgrades, patching, and operational tasks using Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD pipelines, and Python or shell scripting.
• Plan and test backup, recovery, failover, cross-cluster replication, and disaster recovery procedures to support defined service-level objectives and business continuity requirements.
• Participate in production support and on-call rotation, lead technical troubleshooting, document root cause analyses, and coordinate resolution with application teams, infrastructure teams, incident managers, vendors, and cloud support personnel.
• Provide technical guidance on Kafka architecture and operational best practices; maintain runbooks, standards, diagrams, capacity plans, and support documentation; and remain current with Apache Kafka and Confluent capabilities.

Required Qualifications:

• 3+ years of hands-on experience administering enterprise Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform environments, including production cluster design, capacity planning, upgrades, patching, performance tuning, and lifecycle management.
• 3+ years of experience troubleshooting complex Kafka issues involving broker availability, replication, partitioning, rebalance behavior, consumer lag, throughput, latency, storage, and Kafka Connect task failures.
• 3+ years of experience automating infrastructure and platform operations with Terraform and Ansible, supported by Git-based CI/CD pipelines and Python or shell scripting.
• Demonstrated experience designing and supporting highly available Kafka architectures, including cross-cluster replication, failover, backup, recovery, and disaster recovery testing.
• Deep understanding of Kafka security and governance, including TLS, SASL, ACLs, RBAC, Schema Registry compatibility, service accounts, credential management, and audit controls.
• Experience designing and operating observability capabilities using Prometheus, Grafana, Confluent Control Center, OpenSearch, or equivalent solutions, including actionable dashboards and alert thresholds.
• Proven ability to define engineering standards, advise application teams on producer and consumer patterns, review platform designs, and lead technical resolution across multiple teams.
• Proven excellence in client-facing communication, technical documentation, incident leadership, root cause analysis, and consulting skills in English.
• Ability to work in office, participate in an on-call rotation, and collaborate with senior client resources and vendor support teams.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with Confluent Platform or Confluent Cloud components such as KRaft or ZooKeeper, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Control Center, Cluster Linking, and stream-processing capabilities.
• Experience operating Kafka on AWS, Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, or another cloud or container platform; AWS Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) experience is beneficial.
• Experience with GitLab, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Argo CD, or comparable CI/CD and GitOps tooling.
• Experience integrating Kafka with Amazon S3, Trino, OpenSearch, relational databases, IBM MQ, data warehouses, or other enterprise source and sink systems.
• Familiarity with data governance, schema evolution, topic naming and retention standards, capacity forecasting, service-level objectives, and platform cost optimization.
• Relevant certification or formal training in Apache Kafka, Confluent, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, or related technologies.