Kafka Administrator – Apache Kafka, Confluent Platform, Kafka Security

Job Description: Kafka Admin

Toronto Downtown, ON - Hybrid (2-3 Days WFO)

6-12 months

Must Have Technical/Functional Skills

- Apache Kafka Administration

- Kafka Cluster Installation, Configuration, and Management

- Topic, Partition, and Replication Management

- Kafka Broker Administration and Performance Tuning

- Kafka Connect

- Schema Registry

- Consumer Group Management

- Kafka Security (SSL/TLS, SASL, ACLs)

- High Availability and Disaster Recovery Configuration

- Kafka Monitoring and Alerting

- Linux/Unix Administration

- Shell Scripting (Bash) and/or Python Scripting

- Troubleshooting and Root Cause Analysis of Kafka Production Issues

- Capacity Planning and Cluster Scaling

- Log Analysis and Performance Optimization - Experience with Monitoring Tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, ELK, Datadog) - Understanding of Distributed Systems and Event-Driven Architecture - Production Support and Incident Management - Kafka Upgrades, Patching, and Maintenance Activities

Roles & Responsibilities

- Install, configure, administer, and maintain Apache Kafka clusters across Development, Testing, UAT, and Production environments.

- Manage Kafka brokers, topics, partitions, replication factors, and consumer groups to ensure platform stability and performance.

- Monitor Kafka cluster health, availability, capacity, and resource utilization using enterprise monitoring tools.

- Perform Kafka performance tuning, capacity planning, and cluster scaling activities to support growing business workloads.

- Troubleshoot and resolve Kafka infrastructure, messaging, connectivity, and performance-related issues.

- Configure and manage Kafka security controls including SSL/TLS, SASL authentication, ACLs, and encryption standards.

- Support Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and other ecosystem components required for data integration.

- Implement and maintain High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions for Kafka platforms.

- Perform Kafka upgrades, patching, migration, and platform maintenance activities with minimal business impact.

- Collaborate with application, data engineering, infrastructure, and DevOps teams to onboard and support Kafka-based applications.

- Develop and maintain operational procedures, runbooks, architecture documentation, and support guides.

- Configure and manage monitoring, logging, alerting, and incident management processes for Kafka environments.

- Support production deployments, release activities, and environment readiness assessments.

- Perform root cause analysis for production incidents and implement preventive measures to improve platform reliability.

- Automate administrative and operational tasks using Shell scripting, Python, or other automation tools.

- Ensure platform compliance with organizational security, governance, audit, and regulatory requirements.

- Participate in on-call support and provide timely resolution for critical production issues.

- Drive continuous improvement initiatives to enhance Kafka platform performance, scalability, security, and operational efficiency.

Generic Managerial Skills, If any

- Teamwork

- Willingness to learn

Key Words to search in Resume

Apache Kafka, Kafka Cluster Management, Kafka Connect, Confluent Platform, Kafka Security (SSL/SASL/ACL), Linux/Unix Administration, Kafka Performance Tuning