Confluent Kafka Admin

Job location: Columbus, OH (on site work)

We are seeking a hands-on Confluent Kafka Administrator to engineer, administer and support AEP’s enterprise Kafka platform. This is a platform administration and production-operations position—not a Java application-development role.

The administrator will be responsible for Kafka cluster lifecycle management, broker configuration, upgrades, security, performance, monitoring, capacity planning, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry and deployments on OpenShift/Kubernetes.

• Install, configure, administer, patch and upgrade Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform environments.
  
• Administer Kafka clusters, brokers, topics, partitions, replication factors, consumer groups, offsets, quotas and retention policies.
  
• Manage broker configurations, partition reassignment, replication, ISR health and cluster balancing.
  
• Perform capacity planning, performance tuning and resource optimization across production and non-production environments.
  
• Administer Kafka Connect distributed clusters, workers, tasks, connectors, offsets, error handling and dead-letter queues.
  
• Configure and administer Confluent Schema Registry, subjects, compatibility policies and schema lifecycle controls
  
• Deploy and operate Kafka platform components on OpenShift and Kubernetes.
  
• Manage platform configurations, secrets, certificates, ConfigMaps, persistent storage, resource limits and rolling deployments.
  
• Configure Kafka security using TLS/SSL, SASL, ACLs, RBAC, service accounts and certificate management.
  
• Monitor Kafka platform health using Prometheus, Grafana, Dynatrace and Splunk.
  
• Troubleshoot broker outages, consumer lag, under-replicated partitions, offline partitions, disk pressure, connector failures, authentication problems and performance degradation.
  
• Lead production incident response, root-cause analysis and permanent corrective actions.
  
• Support high availability, disaster recovery, backup and platform resilience requirements.
  
• Support CDC integrations involving Oracle GoldenGate and Debezium.
  
• Automate platform configuration and deployment using GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Helm and scripting.
  
• Create operational runbooks, platform standards, monitoring dashboards and reusable onboarding processes.
  
• Participate in production support, maintenance windows, platform upgrades and on-call activities as required.
  

• Strong hands-on experience administering Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform in production.
  
• Demonstrated experience installing, configuring, upgrading and troubleshooting Kafka clusters.
  
• Strong knowledge of brokers, topics, partitions, replication, ISR, consumer groups, offsets, retention and cluster balancing.
  
• Hands-on administration of Kafka Connect and Confluent Schema Registry.
  
• Experience operating Kafka or Confluent components on OpenShift or Kubernetes.
  
• Strong Linux administration and troubleshooting skills.
  
• Experience configuring Kafka security using TLS, SASL, ACLs and RBAC.
  
• Experience monitoring Kafka using Prometheus, Grafana, Dynatrace and/or Splunk.
  
• Experience with GitHub, CI/CD automation and ArgoCD or comparable GitOps tooling.
  
• Ability to clearly explain production incidents, platform upgrades and administrative tasks personally performed.
  

• Oracle GoldenGate or Debezium CDC experience.
  
• Confluent Control Center administration.
  
• Experience with Helm, Terraform or platform-automation scripting.
  
• Experience supporting Snowflake, Iceberg, AWS or Azure integrations.
  
• Familiarity with Java and Spring Boot Kafka applications for troubleshooting purposes.
  
• Experience supporting enterprise utility or other highly regulated production environments.
  

• Candidates must have direct Kafka platform-administration experience. Candidates whose experience is primarily developing Java/Spring Boot producers, consumers or microservices will not qualify.
  

Candidates should be prepared to discuss:

• A Confluent cluster they personally installed or upgraded
  
• Cluster size, broker count and Confluent version
  
• Broker-level configurations they changed
  
• A serious Kafka production incident they resolved
  
• Partition reassignment, replication and ISR troubleshooting
  
• Kafka security configuration
  
• Kafka administration on OpenShift or Kubernetes