Senior Kafka Administrator

Pyramid Consulting, Inc; Missouri; On-site; USD 69,000 - 76,000; Full time

Job summary

Pyramid Consulting, Inc. is seeking a Senior Kafka Administrator for a 6+ month contract with long‑term potential. The role is on-site in Denver, CO or St. Louis, MO, with a pay range of $50-$55 per hour.

The candidate will own and evolve the on‑prem Kafka platform, lead hardware refreshes, and drive reliability and automation across provisioning, deployment, monitoring, and incident response. AWS MSK experience is a plus.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in systems engineering or DevOps with production Kafka experience.
• Experience with on-prem Kafka deployments and hardware refresh planning.
• Strong Linux and networking fundamentals.
• Ability to write clear runbooks and operational docs.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve on‑prem event streaming with a focus on Confluent Platform.
• Lead hardware refresh planning and execution for on‑prem clusters.
• Improve reliability and performance with DevOps, provisioning, deployment, monitoring, and incident response.
• Design, deploy, and operate highly available Kafka clusters (on‑prem, cloud, or managed).
• Manage topics, partitions, quotas, retention, and consumer group strategies.
• Own upgrades, patches, and migrations.
• Implement and manage Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker/Replicator, and REST Proxy.
• Conduct performance tuning, throughput testing, and benchmarking.
• Develop runbooks, standards, and monitoring configurations.
• Lead knowledge transfer sessions and document handoffs at milestones.

Skills

Kafka

Linux fundamentals

Networking

Automation scripting

Documentation

Production Kafka experience

DevOps

Tools

Kafka Connect

Schema Registry

MirrorMaker/Confluent Replicator

REST Proxy

AWS MSK

DataDog

Grafana

JMX exporters

Job description

Immediate need for a talented Senior Kafka Administrator. This is a 06+ Month contract opportunity with long-term potential and is located in Denver, CO / St. Louis, MO (Onsite).

Job Diva ID: 26-32192

Pay Range: $50/hr - $55/hr. Employee benefits include, but are not limited to, health insurance (medical, dental, vision), 401(k) plan, and paid sick leave (depending on work location).

Key Responsibilities:

• Own and evolve the on-prem event streaming platform with a primary focus on Confluent Platform.
• Lead planning and execution of a hardware refresh for on-prem clusters.
• Drive reliability and performance while embedding DevOps/automation across provisioning, deployment, observability, and incident response.
• Design, deploy, and operate highly available Kafka clusters (on-prem, cloud, and/or managed services).
• Manage topics, partitions, quotas, retention policies, and consumer group strategies for performance and cost.
• Own upgrades, patches, and migrations.
• Implement and manage Kafka components: Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker/Confluent Replicator, and REST Proxy.
• Conduct performance tuning, throughput testing, and benchmarking.
• Develop operational documentation, including standards, runbooks, and monitoring configurations.
• Facilitate knowledge transfer sessions and documentation handoff at project milestones.

Key Requirements and Technology Experience:

• Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK operations and integration.
• Experience executing hardware refreshes or major cluster rebuilds/migrations with minimal downtime.
• 5+ years in systems/platform engineering, SRE, or DevOps; 4 years operating Kafka in production at scale.
• Deep knowledge of Kafka internals: partitions, replication, retention/compaction, rebalance strategies.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and MirrorMaker/Confluent Replicator.
• Strong Linux fundamentals and networking skills (TCP, DNS, load balancing).
• Proficiency in automation/scripting.
• Experience with monitoring/observability tools such as Data Dog, Grafana, and JMX exporters.
• Proven ability to produce clear, comprehensive documentation.

Our client is a leading IT Industry and we are currently interviewing to fill this and other similar contract positions.

Pyramid Consulting, Inc. provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

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