Confluent Kafka Admin

ITTConnect is seeking a senior Confluent Kafka Administrator to work on site for a client in the Columbus, OH area. This is a contract position with a client that is a global leader in consulting, digital transformation, technology and engineering services with over 300,000 team members in nearly 50 countries. The end client is in the Utilities sector. 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. Key Responsibilities: 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. Requirements 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. Preferred Qualifications: 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. Important Screening Requirement: 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