Kafka Administrator

Introduction

Responsible for administering, supporting, securing, and continuously improving Kafka platforms across enterprise environments. The role will focus on Kafka/Confluent platform health, automation, observability, security, cloud integration, and platform evolution while providing technical leadership within the relevant Centre of Excellence (COE).

Duties & Responsibilities

• Administer, configure, monitor, and troubleshoot Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform / Confluent Cloud environments.

• Manage Kafka clusters, brokers, topics, partitions, replication, consumer groups, and performance.

• Ensure high availability, reliability, scalability, and overall health of Kafka platforms.

• Implement Kafka security including TLS/SSL, SASL, ACLs, authentication, and authorization .

• Develop automation using Python/Bash and infrastructure-as-code using Terraform/Ansible .

• Integrate Kafka administration and deployments into CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices .

• Support Kafka environments on Linux and Azure Cloud .

• Implement observability, monitoring, alerting, and dashboards using Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Splunk, or Azure Monitor .

• Troubleshoot complex platform, networking, performance, connectivity, and production issues.

• Drive platform upgrades, patching, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and technology lifecycle management.

• Actively own and be accountable for the evolution, stability, and health of multiple technology/domain assets.

• Identify opportunities for automation, optimisation, standardisation, and continuous improvement.

• Provide technical leadership and contribute to the associated Centre of Excellence (COE) .

• Collaborate with engineering, architecture, security, infrastructure, application, and DevOps teams.

• Maintain technical documentation, operational standards, and platform governance.

Desired Experience & Qualification

Requirements: - 6+ years in Systems/Platform Engineering - 4+ years hands-on Kafka administration (preferably Confluent Platform and/or Confluent Cloud) - Strong DevOps and automation skills (Python/Bash, CI/CD, Terraform/Ansible) - Solid Linux skills and troubleshooting experience - Cloud experience, preferably Azure - Strong knowledge of Kafka security (TLS/SSL, SASL, ACLs) - Experience building observability with tools like Prometheus/Grafana, ELK, Splunk, or Azure Monitor