Senior Kafka Platform Engineer (On-Prem/Confluent)

Valiant Technologies LLC; Phoenix (AZ); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Valiant Technologies LLC in the United States seeks a senior contract Kafka/Confluent administrator to own and evolve our on prem event streaming platform with a focus on Confluent Platform. You will lead planning and execution of a hardware refresh for on prem clusters, drive reliability and performance, and embed DevOps automation across provisioning, deployment, observability, and incident response.

Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK is desired for secondary support and

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, rebalance strategies.
• Hands-on with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Mirror Maker/Confluent Replicator.
• Strong Linux fundamentals; networking (TCP, DNS, load balancing), and performance analysis.
• Proficiency in automation/scripting.
• Monitoring/observability: Datadog, 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 managed services).
• 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; familiarity with Kafka Streams and ksqlDB is a plus.
• Performance tuning, throughput testing, and benchmarking.
• Capacity planning, partitioning strategy, and cluster right-sizing.
• Hardware refresh plan: capacity model, sizing, diagrams, migration strategy, risk register.
• Implement and validated on-prem clusters on refreshed hardware with benchmarks.
• Operational documentation: runbooks, monitoring/alerts, backup/DR playbooks.
• Knowledge transfer and documentation handoff at milestones and project close.

Skills

Kafka admin

SRE/DevOps

Linux fundamentals

Networking

Automation scripting

Monitoring

Disaster recovery

Documentation

Tools

Kafka Connect

Schema Registry

Mirror Maker/Replicator

Datadog

Grafana

JMX exporters

Job description

Valiant Technologies LLC in the United States seeks a senior contract Kafka/Confluent administrator to own and evolve our on prem event streaming platform with a focus on Confluent Platform. You will lead planning and execution of a hardware refresh for on prem clusters, drive reliability and performance, and embed DevOps automation across provisioning, deployment, observability, and incident response.

Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK is desired for secondary support and