Kafka Expert

MeteorOps is looking for a freelance Kafka troubleshooting & modernization specialist to step into an older on-prem Kafka environment that currently has no dedicated Kafka owner and limited observability. The cluster supports real-time market quote / HFT tick data at very high throughput (potentially millions of messages/sec) and feeds downstream systems including downsampling services and a SQL Server writer, eventually supporting trading execution workflows.

The Kafka setup is 6–7 years old, deployed on VMware on-prem VMs with 10 Kafka brokers and 5 ZooKeepers, running Kafka 2.13-3.0.0. Each broker has multiple data disks (currently stated as 7 disks ~1TB each; prior notes mention higher disk counts—part of the engagement will be to verify actual layout). Historically disk usage sits around ~10%, but recently one or more brokers spiked toward 100%, coinciding with application Kafka errors and broker/topic instability (e.g., missing leader, invalid partition, impaired topic failover).

You’ll diagnose the incident and underlying risks, produce a clear findings + recommendations report, and help the engineering team implement pragmatic improvements: monitoring, tooling, operational runbooks, resilience/failover improvements, and an assessment of upgrade options (including a path away from ZooKeeper).

What you'll do

• Rapid triage & incident diagnosis
  • Confirm scope of the recent issue (disk saturation, broker health, controller/ZK health, partition leadership, ISR, replication, rebalances).
  • Determine why disk utilization jumped from ~10% to near 100% (retention changes, log segment growth, stuck cleanup, partition skew, under-replication, data directory imbalance, etc.).
  • Identify root causes of missing leader, topic access failures, and invalid partition behavior.
• Cluster assessment & hardening plan
  • Review broker configuration, topic settings (replication factor, min.insync.replicas, retention), partition distribution, rack awareness (if any), and failover behavior.
  • Evaluate ZooKeeper reliability and operational risks; document current failure domains and bottlenecks.
• Observability & operations uplift
  • Propose and/or implement proper Kafka monitoring (broker + ZK + OS/disk), dashboards, and alerting (lag, under-replication, disk, controller events, request latency, GC, network, etc.).
  • Recommend stronger GUI/management tooling beyond read-only usage (currently Kafdrop and Zabbix are used but limited).
• Engineering enablement
  • Produce a Findings Report and Recommendations / Roadmap (quick wins + medium/long-term).
  • Create runbooks for safe operations: broker restart procedure, partition reassignments, capacity checks, config backups, upgrades with minimal disruption, and recovery steps.
  • Coach the engineering team and IT on day-to-day Kafka ops and troubleshooting patterns.
• Optional improvement work
  • Execute selected remediations (e.g., storage rebalancing, retention tuning, partition reassignment, leader imbalance fixes).
  • Assess and plan Kafka upgrade strategy, including ZooKeeper removal (KRaft migration path) if appropriate for their risk tolerance and timelines.
  • Improve resilience posture toward minimized RTO/RPO (goal: “as low as practical,” possibly ~1 minute max data loss tolerance).

What we're looking for

Must-have

• Proven hands-on experience operating Kafka in production, including high-throughput clusters.
• Strong troubleshooting of:
  • Partition leadership issues, missing leaders, ISR shrinkage, under-replicated partitions
  • Broker restarts and safe recovery without “sledgehammer” approaches
  • Storage/disk issues on multi-disk broker layouts (JBOD patterns, partition skew, log retention/cleanup behavior)
• Linux systems competence: disk/IO analysis, filesystem saturation, process/resource analysis, networking basics.
• Experience with ZooKeeper-based Kafka clusters and operational best practices.
• Ability to deliver clear, actionable documentation: findings, recommendations, and runbooks.
• Strong communication skills for working with a mixed team (engineering + IT unfamiliar with Kafka).
  

Nice-to-have

• Experience with Kafka monitoring stacks (e.g., JMX metrics pipelines, Prometheus/Grafana, lag monitoring, alerting design).
• Experience with GUI/admin tooling and governance practices (RBAC, auditing approach, safer topic/config workflows).
• Experience planning Kafka upgrades and migrations, including evaluation of KRaft readiness and risk.
• Familiarity with workloads involving market data / trading systems and latency-sensitive pipelines.
• Experience with VMware-based on-prem operations and capacity planning.

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