Kafka Platform Engineer - Real-Time Data Backbone

American Electric Power; Columbus, Northern (OH, KY); Hybrid; USD 99,000 - 129,000; Full time

Job summary

American Electric Power in Columbus, OH seeks a senior Kafka engineer to own the enterprise data movement backbone. You will engineer, operate, and scale Confluent Kafka deployments, ensuring reliability, data safety, and platform stability.

You\'ll containerize microservices on OpenShift, build CI/CD with GitHub Actions and Argo CD, and collaborate with architects to meet integration needs across on-prem and cloud environments. Strong knowledge of AWS/Azure and TLS security is expected.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a computer science, engineering, or related technical field.
• 7 years of relevant work experience in data streaming or similar roles.
• Certifications such as CCAAK, CCDAK or CCAC are preferred.

Responsibilities

• Deploy and manage Kafka connectors and CDC streams in Confluent environments.
• Containerize and deploy microservices on OpenShift using Docker and YAML.
• Implement CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions and Argo CD for automated deployments.
• Perform Kafka admin tasks: topic creation, partitioning, replication, and monitoring.
• Collaborate with architects and product teams to design scalable integrations.
• Monitor Kafka clusters using Confluent Control Center, Prometheus, and Grafana.
• Develop custom connectors for data sources and sinks and support production deployments.

Skills

Kafka

OpenShift

Docker

CI/CD

Python/Java

AWS/Azure

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or related field

Tools

Confluent Kafka

GitHub Actions

Argo CD

Kubernetes

Confluent Schema Registry

OpenShift

Job description

American Electric Power in Columbus, OH seeks a senior Kafka engineer to own the enterprise data movement backbone. You will engineer, operate, and scale Confluent Kafka deployments, ensuring reliability, data safety, and platform stability.

You\'ll containerize microservices on OpenShift, build CI/CD with GitHub Actions and Argo CD, and collaborate with architects to meet integration needs across on-prem and cloud environments. Strong knowledge of AWS/Azure and TLS security is expected.