Kafka Admin Lead-6months-London

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Kirtana consulting is looking for Kafka Admin Lead for 6months rolling contract in London.

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Job description:

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Role Title: Kafka Admin Lead

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Minimum years of experience: 12+ years

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Responsibilities

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Provision, configure, and manage Kafka clusters (Apache Kafka KRaft or ZooKeeper-backed if Legacy), Confluent Platform components (Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, ksqlDB, REST Proxy, Control Center), and Confluent Cloud resources.

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Ensure high availability (HA) and resilience across multi AZ/region deployments; manage partition replication, min.insync.replicas (ISR), and rack awareness.

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Implement and maintain client quotas, broker quotas, throttling, and back pressure strategies.

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Plan and execute upgrades/patching with zero/minimal downtime; maintain version currency against EOL and security advisories.

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Own backup/restore workflows for metadata (eg, cluster configs), Schema Registry, and Connect configs

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Implement authentication (mTLS/SASL: SCRAM, OAUTHBEARER with IdP, or Kerberos if Legacy) and authorization (Kafka ACLs, Confluent RBAC).

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Enforce encryption in transit and at rest, secret management (Vault/AKV/SSM), secure endpoint exposure, and private connectivity (VPC peering/PrivateLink).

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Govern topic naming conventions, retention policies, schema evolution rules (backward/fully compatible), and PII handling.

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Maintain audit trails (broker, Schema Registry, Control Center, Confluent Cloud audit logs) and compliance artifacts (SOX, GDPR, HIPAA/PCI as applicable).

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Coordinate vulnerability management (CVE watch, hardening baselines, CIS/STIG alignment).

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Deploy and maintain metrics pipelines (JMX - Prometheus/Grafana), logs (ELK/OPensearch), and tracing (OpenTelemetry where applicable).

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Define and monitor SLOs/SLIs (produce/consume latency, end to end lag, broker CPU/heap/file handles, network throughput, GC pauses).

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Analyze broker hotspots, partition skew, large message handling, compaction and retention settings, and tune GC/JVM for sustained throughput.

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Implement consumer lag monitoring and alerting with actionable runbooks to prevent data loss or SLA breaches.

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Model workload growth, topic/partition scaling, storage/IOPS, network egress/ingress, and broker sizing.

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For Confluent Cloud, optimize environment - cluster - topic hierarchy, throughput tiers, retention costs, and data flow egress; right size Dedicated vs. Standard clusters.

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Design partitioning strategies to meet throughput targets while balancing consumer concurrency and avoiding small partitions anti patterns

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Automate cluster and topic life cycle using Terraform (providers for Kafka/Confluent), Helm, GitOps workflows.

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Operate and scale Kafka Connect with distributed workers; manage connectors (JDBC, Debezium CDC, S3/ADLS/GCS, Elasticsearch, etc.), transforms (SMTs), and converter settings.

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Administer Schema Registry (compatibility levels, subject naming strategies, serializers/deserializers, schema size & references).

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Operate ksqlDB and/or Flink for streaming SQL; enforce resource limits and multi tenant governance.

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Engineer low latency and secure connectivity across data centers/VPCs/VNETs; manage DNS, TLS SANs, LB configurations, advertised.listeners, and inter cluster networking.

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Required Skills & Experience

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5-10 years in platform/SRE/DevOps; 3+ years dedicated to Kafka/Confluent admin in production.

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Strong hands on with Apache Kafka internals: brokers, controllers (KRaft), partitions/replication, log segments, compaction/retention.

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Confluent Platform: Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, ksqlDB, Control Center, Confluent REST APIs; or Confluent Cloud admin (environments, clusters, RBAC, audit logs, networking).

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Proficiency with Kafka CLI tools and AdminClient usage; deep knowledge of ACLs, quotas, transactions, idempotent producers, and exactly once semantics scenarios.

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Prometheus/Grafana, JMX exporters, alerting systems (Alertmanager etc).

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JVM tuning, Linux performance (NUMA, file descriptors, page cache, disk/RAID, XFS), and network tuning (TCP buffers, MTU, jumbo frames where applicable).

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Linux administration (systemd, journald, Kernel params), virtualization/containers (Docker, Kubernetes).

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Cloud networking (VPC/VNET peering, transit gateways, PrivateLink/Private Service Connect), multi region architectures.

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Preferrable

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Confluent Certified Administrator for Apache Kafka (CCAAK), CKA/CKAD, HashiCorp Terraform Associate, major cloud certs (Azure/AWS/GCP).

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Experience with Confluent for Kubernetes (CFK) for operator based deployments.