Kafka Engineer/Administrator

Kafka Engineer
Onsite in Denver, CO (4-days per week)
Join a multinational telecom technology leader and help power the real-time data backbone that keeps critical systems running. This is a high-impact role for an engineer who wants to own meaningful infrastructure, sharpen deep technical skills, and work alongside teams who value reliability and innovation.
Why This Role:
* Work hands-on with cutting-edge Kafka and Confluent Platform architecture at enterprise scale
* Build real influence: your decisions directly shape platform reliability, security, and performance
* Grow your expertise across automation, cloud infrastructure, and streaming data systems
* Be the go-to technical voice for Kafka strategy and best practices across the organization
What You Will Do:
Build and Scale the Platform:
Design, deploy, and maintain highly available Apache Kafka and Confluent clusters that power real-time data processing across production and non-production environments.
Keep Things Running Smoothly:
Monitor broker performance, replication, partition balance, throughput, and consumer lag. Troubleshoot issues and fine-tune the platform for maximum uptime and efficiency.
Enable Integration:
Support Kafka topics, schemas, and Kafka Connect integrations, including connectors for Amazon S3, Trino, and OpenSearch. Partner with application and data teams to help them connect producers and consumers successfully.
Strengthen Security:
Implement TLS encryption, SASL authentication, access controls, secrets management, and secure certificate practices to keep the platform compliant and protected.
Automate Everything:
Use Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD pipelines, and Python or shell scripting to automate provisioning, scaling, upgrades, and routine operations.
Plan for Resilience:
Design and test backup, recovery, failover, and disaster recovery procedures that meet business continuity and service-level goals.
Lead Through Challenges:
Take part in on-call rotation, drive root cause analysis, and collaborate with infrastructure teams, vendors, and cloud support to resolve incidents quickly.
Share Your Expertise:
Guide teams on Kafka architecture and best practices. Maintain clear runbooks, diagrams, and documentation, and stay current with the latest Kafka and Confluent capabilities.
If you would like to learn more about this opportunity, please reach out to Elite Technical.

Required Skills

Required Skills:
- 3+ years of hands-on experience administering enterprise Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform environments, including production cluster design, capacity planning, upgrades, patching, performance tuning, and lifecycle management.
- 3+ years of experience troubleshooting complex Kafka issues involving broker availability, replication, partitioning, rebalance behavior, consumer lag, throughput, latency, storage, and Kafka Connect task failures.
- 3+ years of experience automating infrastructure and platform operations with Terraform and Ansible, supported by Git-based CI/CD pipelines and Python or shell scripting.
- Demonstrated experience designing and supporting highly available Kafka architectures, including cross-cluster replication, failover, backup, recovery, and disaster recovery testing.
- Deep understanding of Kafka security and governance, including TLS, SASL, ACLs, RBAC, Schema Registry compatibility, service accounts, credential management, and audit controls.
- Experience designing and operating observability capabilities using Prometheus, Grafana, Confluent Control Center, OpenSearch, or equivalent solutions, including actionable dashboards and alert thresholds.
- Proven ability to define engineering standards, advise application teams on producer and consumer patterns, review platform designs, and lead technical resolution across multiple teams.
- Proven excellence in client-facing communication, technical documentation, incident leadership, root cause analysis, and consulting skills in English.
- Ability to work in office, participate in an on-call rotation, and collaborate with senior client resources and vendor support teams.