Kafka Platform Engineer: Real-Time Data Backbone & Ops

American Electric Power Co.; Columbus (OH); On-site; USD 99,000 - 129,000; Full time

Job summary

American Electric Power Co. in Columbus, OH seeks a Subject Matter Expert for Kafka-based integrations who will engineer, operate, and scale our enterprise Kafka platform across on-prem and cloud environments.

You will deploy connectors, manage OpenShift deployments, build CI/CD pipelines, monitor health, and collaborate with architects and product teams to deliver reliable data movement.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or related technical field is required.

Responsibilities

• Deploy and manage Kafka connectors (CDC, JDBC, IBM MQ, Redshift, etc.) in Confluent Kafka environments.
• Containerize and deploy microservices and connectors on OpenShift using Docker, YAML, and Kustomize.
• Implement CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions and Argo CD for automated deployments.
• Perform basic Kafka administration tasks such as topic creation, partitioning, replication, and monitoring.
• Collaborate with architects and business teams to understand integration requirements and deliver scalable solutions.
• Monitor Kafka clusters and connector health using tools like Confluent Control Center, Prometheus, Grafana, Dynatrace, Splunk and OpenShift-native monitoring.
• Build and maintain custom connectors for specialized data sources and sinks.
• Support production deployments and troubleshoot issues across Kafka pipelines and OpenShift environments.
• Clear understanding of cloud managed services including AWS, Azure cloud to deploy Confluent connectors for data integrations
• Support real-time data streaming between on-prem systems and cloud/SaaS platforms.
• Work closely with business teams, architects, and product owners to understand integration requirements.
• Coordinate with co-sourced/offshore teams for development and deployment tasks.
• Conduct code reviews, quality checks, and ensure adherence to standards.
• Ensure reliability and scalability of Kafka pipelines by applying 12-Factor principles and microservices architecture.
• Collaborate with architects and platform teams to align Kafka solutions with enterprise integration patterns and cloud strategies.
• Automate deployment, monitoring, and operational tasks wherever possible.
• Own integration of deliverables from design through production deployment.
• Act as Subject Matter Expert (SME) for Kafka-based integrations and cluster administration.

Skills

Kafka

OpenShift

Docker

CI/CD

Cloud (AWS/Azure)

Education

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

Tools

Confluent Kafka

OpenShift

Kubernetes

GitHub Actions

Argo CD

Prometheus

Grafana

Dynatrace

Splunk

Confluent Control Center

Job description

American Electric Power Co. in Columbus, OH seeks a Subject Matter Expert for Kafka-based integrations who will engineer, operate, and scale our enterprise Kafka platform across on-prem and cloud environments.

You will deploy connectors, manage OpenShift deployments, build CI/CD pipelines, monitor health, and collaborate with architects and product teams to deliver reliable data movement.