Kafka Platform Engineer: Real-Time Data Backbone

American Electric Power; North Carolina; On-site; USD 99,000 - 129,000; Full time

Job summary

American Electric Power seeks an experienced Kafka Platform Engineer to engineer and operate the enterprise Kafka backbone. You will focus on stability, scalability, data safety, and enabling producer/consumer teams across the organization.

You will deploy connectors, containerize microservices on OpenShift, implement CI/CD pipelines, and monitor systems with toolchains like Confluent Control Center, Prometheus, Grafana, and Splunk.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a technical field
• 7 years' relevant work experience required
• Strong hands-on Kafka production experience
• Experience deployments in Kubernetes/OpenShift environments
• Knowledge of distributed systems and fault tolerance

Responsibilities

• Deploy and manage Kafka connectors (CDC, JDBC, IBM MQ, Redshift, etc.)
• Containerize and deploy microservices and connectors on OpenShift using Docker, YAML, and Kustomize
• Implement CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions and Argo CD
• Perform basic Kafka administration: topics, partitions, replication, monitoring
• Collaborate with architects and teams to deliver scalable integrations
• Monitor Kafka clusters and connector health using Confluent Control Center, Prometheus, Grafana, Dynatrace, Splunk
• Build and maintain custom connectors for various data sources
• Support production deployments and troubleshoot Kafka pipelines and OpenShift issues
• Understand cloud managed services (AWS, Azure) for deployment
• Support real-time data streaming between on-prem and cloud/SaaS
• Coordinate with offshore teams for development and deployment
• Conduct code reviews and ensure standards compliance
• Own end-to-end integration deliverables as SME for Kafka-based solutions
• Ensure scalability and reliability of Kafka pipelines with 12-Factor app principles

Skills

Kafka

OpenShift

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

GitHub Actions

Argo CD

Monitoring

Python/Java

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Engineering

Tools

Confluent Kafka

Prometheus

Grafana

Dynatrace

Splunk

AWS/Azure

Job description

American Electric Power seeks an experienced Kafka Platform Engineer to engineer and operate the enterprise Kafka backbone. You will focus on stability, scalability, data safety, and enabling producer/consumer teams across the organization.

You will deploy connectors, containerize microservices on OpenShift, implement CI/CD pipelines, and monitor systems with toolchains like Confluent Control Center, Prometheus, Grafana, and Splunk.