Lead Kafka Platform Engineer – Onsite Denver

Salesforce, Inc.; Denver (CO); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Salesforce, Inc. in Denver, CO, seeks a Kafka Engineer/Administrator to design, deploy, and manage high-availability Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform environments supporting real-time data processing across production and non-production systems.

Responsibilities include monitoring health and performance, securing the platform, building connectors (S3, Trino, OpenSearch), and automating tasks with Terraform and Ansible. On-site, collaboration with multiple teams is required.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of hands-on experience administering enterprise Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform environments.
• 3+ years troubleshooting complex Kafka issues including broker availability and consumer lag.
• 3+ years automating infrastructure with Terraform and Ansible, with Git-based CI/CD pipelines and Python or shell scripting.
• Experience designing highly available Kafka architectures including cross-cluster replication, failover, backup, recovery and disaster recovery testing.
• Deep knowledge of Kafka security, RBAC, TLS/SASL, ACLs, and audit controls.
• Experience building observability with Prometheus, Grafana, OpenSearch or similar, with dashboards and alerting.
• Ability to define engineering standards and lead cross-team technical resolutions.
• Strong client-facing communication, documentation and incident leadership in English.
• Willingness to work in an office, participate in on-call rotation, and collaborate with senior resources and vendor support teams.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, configure, upgrade, and maintain Kafka and Confluent Platform clusters for real-time data processing.
• Manage Kafka and Confluent Platform clusters across production and non-production environments.
• Monitor platform health, broker performance, replication, partition balance, throughput, storage, consumer lag and connector status; troubleshoot incidents and tune for reliability and performance.
• Build and support Kafka topics, partitions, replication policies, schemas, service accounts and Kafka Connect integrations (S3, Trino, OpenSearch).
• Implement and maintain platform security controls: TLS, SASL, ACLs, RBAC, secrets management, audits and certificate lifecycle.
• Automate provisioning, configuration, scaling, upgrades, patching and operational tasks with Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD and scripting.
• Plan and test backup, recovery, failover, cross-cluster replication and DR procedures to meet SLAs and business continuity.
• Participate in production support and on-call rotation; document root cause analyses and coordinate resolution with multiple teams and vendors.
• Provide technical guidance on Kafka architecture and best practices; maintain runbooks, diagrams, capacity plans and support documentation.

Skills

English communication

Incident leadership

Cross-team collaboration

Documentation

Problem solving

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

CI/CD pipelines

Python scripting

Shell scripting

Prometheus

Grafana

Confluent Platform

Kubernetes

AWS MSK

OpenSearch

Kafka Connect

Schema Registry

Job description

Salesforce, Inc. in Denver, CO, seeks a Kafka Engineer/Administrator to design, deploy, and manage high-availability Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform environments supporting real-time data processing across production and non-production systems.

Responsibilities include monitoring health and performance, securing the platform, building connectors (S3, Trino, OpenSearch), and automating tasks with Terraform and Ansible. On-site, collaboration with multiple teams is required.