Kafka Engineer/Administrator

Holistic Partners, Inc; Englewood (CO); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Holistic Partners, Inc. seeks an experienced Kafka platform administrator for onsite roles in Englewood, CO and Maryland Heights, MO. You will lead production operations of Apache Kafka/Confluent, design scalable architectures, and drive upgrades, security governance, and reliability initiatives.

The role requires strong scripting and CI/CD experience and on‑call participation. Ideal candidates have 3+ years of production Kafka management, plus hands‑on experience with Terraform, Ansible, and

Qualifications

• Hands-on production administration of Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform for 3+ years.
• Experience with cluster design, capacity planning, upgrades, patching and performance tuning.
• Strong knowledge of TLS, SASL, ACLs, RBAC, Schema Registry, and audit controls.

Responsibilities

• Manage and optimize Kafka/Confluent clusters including failover and DR testing.
• Troubleshoot broker availability, replication, partitioning, rebalances and consumer lag.
• Automate platform operations with Terraform, Ansible and CI/CD tooling.
• Design HA architectures, cross‑cluster replication and backup strategies.
• Ensure security governance and auditing for Kafka deployments.
• Maintain observability using Prometheus, Grafana or similar tooling.
• Provide leadership during incidents and produce RCA documentation.
• Collaborate onsite and participate in on‑call rotations.

Skills

Kafka admin

Terraform

Ansible

Python scripting

CI/CD pipelines

On-call support

Kubernetes

Kafka security

Observability

Documentation

Tools

GitLab

GitHub Actions

Jenkins

Argo CD

OpenShift

Job description

Location : Englewood, CO (near Fiddler's Green Circle, Denver metro) / Maryland Heights, MO (Riverport Dr, St. Louis metro) - Onsite

Duration:: 6+ months

Interview: Virtual

Skills Required:

• This is a hands‑on platform admin role for self‑managed Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform.
• Candidates who have only used Kafka as developers, or only worked with managed Amazon MSK, will not be considered.
• Must have (3+ years each):
• Production administration of enterprise Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform: cluster design, capacity planning, upgrades, patching, performance tuning
• Troubleshooting broker availability, replication, partitioning, rebalances, consumer lag, throughput/latency, and Kafka Connect task failures
• Automating platform operations with Terraform and Ansible, Git‑based CI/CD, and Python or shell scripting
• Designing and supporting HA Kafka architectures: cross‑cluster replication, failover, backup/recovery, DR testing
• Kafka security and governance: TLS, SASL, ACLs, RBAC, Schema Registry, service accounts, audit controls
• Observability with Prometheus, Grafana, Confluent Control Center, or OpenSearch
• Strong client‑facing communication, incident leadership, RCA, and documentation
• Able to work onsite and join an on‑call rotation
• Kafka on AWS, Kubernetes, or OpenShift; Amazon MSK
• GitLab, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or Argo CD
• Connect integrations to S3, Trino, OpenSearch, relational DBs, IBM MQ
• Kafka, Confluent, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, or Ansible certifications