Onsite Kafka Engineer - AWS/Confluent, Terraform

ZealHire Inc.; Maryland Heights (MO); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

ZealHire Inc. is seeking an onsite Apache Kafka/Confluent Platform engineer to design, deploy, and maintain scalable real-time data pipelines near Englewood, Colorado or Maryland Heights, Missouri.

The role requires hands-on Kafka expertise, security governance, and experience in automation using Terraform, Ansible, and Python. The successful candidate will monitor platform health, optimize performance, and support cross-team data initiatives while participating in on-call rotation and DR

Qualifications

• 3+ years of hands-on experience administering enterprise Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform environments.
• 3+ years of experience troubleshooting complex Kafka issues.
• 3+ years of experience automating infrastructure and platform operations with Terraform and Ansible, supported by Git-based CI/CD pipelines and Python or shell scripting.
• Experience designing and operating highly available Kafka architectures, including cross-cluster replication, failover, backup, recovery, and disaster recovery testing.
• Deep understanding of Kafka security and governance, including TLS, SASL, ACLs, RBAC, Schema Registry compatibility, service accounts, credential management, and audit controls.
• Experience designing and operating observability capabilities using Prometheus, Grafana, Confluent Control Center, OpenSearch, or equivalent solutions.
• Proven ability to define engineering standards, advise application teams on producer and consumer patterns, review platform designs, and lead technical resolution across multiple teams.
• Proven excellence in client-facing communication, technical documentation, incident leadership, root cause analysis, and consulting skills in English.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, configure, upgrade, and maintain Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform clusters for real-time data processing.
• Monitor broker health, replication, partition balance, throughput, and consumer lag; troubleshoot incidents and optimize performance.
• Build and support Kafka topics, partitions, replication policies, schemas, and Kafka Connect integrations (S3, Trino, OpenSearch).
• Maintain platform security and compliance controls (TLS, SASL, ACLs, RBAC, secrets management).
• Automate clustering tasks using Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD pipelines, and Python or shell scripting.
• Test backup, recovery, failover, cross-cluster replication, and DR procedures to meet SLAs and continuity goals.
• Participate in on-call rotation; document root cause analyses and coordinate with application teams, vendors, and cloud support.
• Provide guidance on Kafka architecture and runbooks; stay current with Apache Kafka and Confluent capabilities.

Skills

Communication

Technical documentation

Incident leadership

Root cause analysis

Consulting skills

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

CI/CD pipelines

Python

Shell scripting

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenSearch

Kafka

Confluent Platform

KRaft

ZooKeeper

Schema Registry

AWS

Kubernetes

OpenShift

Job description

ZealHire Inc. is seeking an onsite Apache Kafka/Confluent Platform engineer to design, deploy, and maintain scalable real-time data pipelines near Englewood, Colorado or Maryland Heights, Missouri.

The role requires hands-on Kafka expertise, security governance, and experience in automation using Terraform, Ansible, and Python. The successful candidate will monitor platform health, optimize performance, and support cross-team data initiatives while participating in on-call rotation and DR