Kafka Platform Engineer: Cluster Design & Ops

Ampstek; St. Louis (MO); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Ampstek is seeking a Kafka Platform Support specialist to design, deploy, and operate highly available Kafka clusters across on-prem, cloud, and managed services such as Confluent Cloud or AWS MSK.

You will manage topics, partitions, quotas, and retention, own upgrades and migrations, and implement components like Kafka Connect and Schema Registry. Familiarity with Streams and ksqlDB is a plus. You'll focus on performance tuning, throughput benchmarking, and right-sizing clusters.

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

Job description

Ampstek is seeking a Kafka Platform Support specialist to design, deploy, and operate highly available Kafka clusters across on-prem, cloud, and managed services such as Confluent Cloud or AWS MSK.

You will manage topics, partitions, quotas, and retention, own upgrades and migrations, and implement components like Kafka Connect and Schema Registry. Familiarity with Streams and ksqlDB is a plus. You'll focus on performance tuning, throughput benchmarking, and right-sizing clusters.