Senior Kafka Platform Engineer - Onsite (6+ Mo Contract)

Pyramid Consulting, Inc; St. Louis (MO); On-site; USD 69,000 - 76,000; Full time

Job summary

Senior Kafka Administrator is sought for an immediate on-site contract with Pyramid Consulting, Inc. The role focuses on on-prem Confluent Platform operations, hardware refresh planning, and reliability improvements across on-prem and cloud components in Denver or St.

Louis. Responsibilities include designing and operating highly available Kafka clusters, managing topics and retention, upgrades, and implementing Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker, and REST Proxy.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in systems/platform engineering, SRE, or DevOps.
• 4 years operating Kafka in production at scale.
• Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK operations.
• Hardware refreshes or major cluster rebuilds/migrations with minimal downtime.
• Strong Linux fundamentals and networking.
• Proficiency in automation/scripting.
• Experience with monitoring/observability tools such as Data Dog, Grafana, and JMX exporters.
• Proven ability to produce clear, comprehensive documentation.

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.

Skills

Kafka administration

SRE / DevOps

AWS MSK

Linux

Automation

Networking

Documentation

Performance tuning

Tools

Kafka Connect

Schema Registry

MirrorMaker/Confluent Replicator

REST Proxy

Data Dog

Grafana

JMX exporters

Job description

Senior Kafka Administrator is sought for an immediate on-site contract with Pyramid Consulting, Inc. The role focuses on on-prem Confluent Platform operations, hardware refresh planning, and reliability improvements across on-prem and cloud components in Denver or St.

Louis. Responsibilities include designing and operating highly available Kafka clusters, managing topics and retention, upgrades, and implementing Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker, and REST Proxy.