Kafka Administrator - Automation

Job Title: Kafka Administrator - Automation

Role Summary

We are seeking an experienced Kafka Administrator with a strong automation focus to manage, secure, and scale high-availability Kafka clusters across on-premise and cloud environments. The ideal candidate will leverage Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and automation tools such as Ansible, Terraform, and GitOps frameworks to minimize manual operations and improve reliability.

This role involves deploying Kafka on Kubernetes/OpenShift using Confluent for Kubernetes (CFK) , automating cluster operations, ensuring security compliance, and maintaining performance monitoring and disaster recovery strategies.

Key Responsibilities

Automation & Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

• Develop and maintain Ansible playbooks and Python/Shell scripts to automate Kafka installation, configuration, upgrades, and patching.

• Implement Terraform-based infrastructure provisioning and GitOps workflows using tools like ArgoCD or Jenkins for continuous deployment.

• Automate Kafka cluster operations including topic and partition management.

Kafka Cluster Management & Deployment

• Deploy and manage Confluent Platform using Confluent for Kubernetes (CFK) on Kubernetes/OpenShift .

• Configure and maintain KRaft (Kafka Raft) mode , topics, partitions, and replication factors to ensure high availability and fault tolerance.

• Perform cluster scaling, upgrades, and performance optimization.

Monitoring & Performance Optimization

• Implement monitoring using Prometheus, Grafana, JMX, and Confluent Control Center .

• Monitor broker health, consumer lag, throughput, and producer latency .

• Troubleshoot performance bottlenecks and ensure optimal system performance.

Security & Compliance

• Implement and automate Kafka security mechanisms including:

  • TLS/SSL encryption

  • SASL authentication

  • Kerberos integration

  • RBAC and ACL management

• Manage certificate lifecycle and ensure compliance with security policies.

Kafka Connect & Schema Management

• Configure and manage Kafka Connect clusters and connectors (e.g., S3, JDBC, Snowflake).

• Manage schemas and enforce data governance using Confluent Schema Registry .

Disaster Recovery & High Availability

• Design and maintain Active-Passive cluster setups for disaster recovery.

• Configure Cluster Linking or multi-region replication for high availability and data resilience.