Kafka Engineer/ Admin

About the role

The ideal candidate will design, deploy, maintain, and scale Kafka clusters in mission-critical environments, while also supporting the Linux-based infrastructure that forms the foundation of our real-time data platform.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain highly available Kafka clusters in production environments.
• Perform Kafka upgrades and patching ensuring minimal downtime and seamless transitions.
• Administer security protocols and access controls to protect the platform.
• Monitor cluster health and performance using our established monitoring stack (Prometheus, Grafana).
• Troubleshoot and resolve cluster-related incidents such as broker outages, replication lag.
• Develop and enhance automation scripts to streamline operational tasks and reduce manual intervention.
• Assist with planning and managing cluster resources to support future growth.
• Develop Kafka topics, partitions, ACLs, schema registry, and optimize throughput and reliability.
• Manage and tune Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, and Mirror Maker as needed for data pipelines.
• Ensure platform reliability and performance on enterprise-grade Linux systems (RHEL, Ubuntu).
• Automate Kafka provisioning, configuration, and monitoring using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and configuration management tools (e.g., Ansible, Terraform).
• Build custom Kafka tooling and dashboards for producers and consumers, monitor lag and health metrics.
• Work with engineering teams to onboard new Kafka use cases and ensure security and compliance standards.
• Perform root cause analysis and resolution of platform-level incidents and outages.
• Develop and maintain Linux shell scripts for automation of deployments, monitoring, and maintenance tasks.
• Deep knowledge of Kafka ecosystem components like ZooKeeper, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker, KRaft (Kafka without ZooKeeper).

Requirements

• Five or more years of Kafka administration experience, ideally with Confluent Kafka.
• Working experience with OpenShift Kubernetes Cloud services to deploy Kafka clusters using vendor-provided Helm charts & Docker images.
• Kafka resiliency (disaster recovery setup) and observability for Kafka nodes.
• Data ingestion & streaming pipeline setup for other data platforms to Kafka & Kafka to data sources like Solr.
• Proficiency in Linux, Python, or Bash scripting.
• Hands-on knowledge of Kafka monitoring tools and experience with security protocols.

Qualifications

• BE/B Tech/MCA.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.