Senior Kafka Platform Engineer — On-Prem & Confluent

Ampstek; Denver (CO); On-site; USD 152,000 - 234,000; Full time

Job summary

Ampstek is seeking a senior contract Kafka/Confluent administrator to own and evolve our on‑prem event streaming platform, with a primary focus on Confluent Platform. You will lead planning and execution of a hardware refresh for our on‑prem clusters, drive reliability and performance, and embed DevOps/automation across provisioning, deployment, observability, and incident response.

Responsibilities include deploying and operating high-availability Kafka clusters, managing topics and retention,

Qualifications

• 5+ years in systems/platform engineering or DevOps.
• 4+ years operating Kafka in production at scale.
• Deep knowledge of Kafka internals and components.
• Strong Linux fundamentals and networking understanding.
• Proficient in automation and scripting for operations.
• Experience with monitoring and incident management.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and operate highly available Kafka clusters on‑prem and in the cloud.
• Manage topics, partitions, quotas, retention, and consumer groups.
• Own upgrades, patches, and migrations.
• Implement Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker/Confluent Replicator; familiarity with ksqlDB is a plus.
• Performance tuning, benchmarking, and capacity planning.
• Hardware refresh planning, sizing, and migration strategy.
• Create runbooks, standards, and operational documentation; conduct knowledge transfer.

Skills

Kafka

Kafka Connect

Schema Registry

MirrorMaker

Linux

Networking

Automation scripting

Monitoring

Incident management

Documentation

Multi-region design

Tools

DataDog

Grafana

JMX exporters

Logging tools

Job description

Ampstek is seeking a senior contract Kafka/Confluent administrator to own and evolve our on‑prem event streaming platform, with a primary focus on Confluent Platform. You will lead planning and execution of a hardware refresh for our on‑prem clusters, drive reliability and performance, and embed DevOps/automation across provisioning, deployment, observability, and incident response.

Responsibilities include deploying and operating high-availability Kafka clusters, managing topics and retention,