Senior Kafka Platform Engineer - On-Prem & Cloud

Artifintech; Phoenix (AZ); On-site; USD 96,000 - 165,000; Full time

Job summary

Artifintech is seeking a senior contract Kafka/Confluent administrator to own and evolve our on‑prem event streaming platform focused on Confluent Platform. You will plan and execute hardware refreshes for on‑prem clusters, drive reliability, and embed DevOps practices across provisioning, deployment, observability, and incident response.

You will lead upgrades, tuning, and migrations, with optional exposure to AWS MSK and Confluent Cloud for cross‑environment alignment.

Qualifications

• 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.
• Hands-on with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Mirror Maker/Confluent Replicator.
• Strong Linux fundamentals; networking and performance analysis.
• Proficiency in automation/scripting.
• Monitoring/observability: Data Dog, Grafana, JMX exporters, and log aggregation.
• Experience with DR, multi-region design, and incident management.
• Proven ability to produce clear, comprehensive documentation.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and operate highly available Kafka clusters (on-prem, cloud, and/or Confluent Cloud or AWS MSK).
• Manage topics, partitions, quotas, retention policies, and consumer group strategies.
• Own upgrades, patches, and migrations.
• Implement and manage Kafka components: Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Mirror Maker/Confluent Replicator, REST Proxy; knowledge of Streams/ksqlDB is a plus.
• Performance tuning, benchmarking, and throughput testing.
• Capacity planning, partitioning strategy, and cluster right-sizing.
• Hardware refresh planning, architecture diagrams, migration/cutover strategy, risk register.
• Develop and validate on-prem clusters on refreshed hardware with performance benchmarks.
• Produce operational documentation: runbooks, monitoring, backup/DR playbooks.

Skills

Kafka

Confluent Platform

Automation

Monitoring

Linux

Networking

Documentation

Tools

Kafka Connect

Schema Registry

Mirror Maker

Confluent Replicator

REST Proxy

Kafka Streams

ksqlDB

Job description

Artifintech is seeking a senior contract Kafka/Confluent administrator to own and evolve our on‑prem event streaming platform focused on Confluent Platform. You will plan and execute hardware refreshes for on‑prem clusters, drive reliability, and embed DevOps practices across provisioning, deployment, observability, and incident response.

You will lead upgrades, tuning, and migrations, with optional exposure to AWS MSK and Confluent Cloud for cross‑environment alignment.