[Remote] Kafka Administrator/Platform Engineer

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. HRUCKUS is a veteran-owned management consulting and recruiting firm supporting organizations in defense, government, and research-focused sectors. The company is seeking an experienced Kafka Administrator Platform Engineer to administer and enhance Kafka platforms, own the Kafka control plane, and ensure reliable enterprise data streaming across systems and third-party partners. The role also involves cloud engineering, incident resolution, automation, security, platform governance, and collaboration with application teams in an Agile environment.

Responsibilities

• Administer and support Kafka platforms across on-premises and cloud environments
• Own the Kafka control plane and design and run clusters end-to-end (including capacity, partitions, replication, upgrades, and DR)
• Handle broker instability, unresponsiveness, ISR issues, rebalances, and disk pressure
• Operate security models including RBAC ACLs, cert rotation, and authN authZ
• Enforce platform governance, onboarding patterns, guardrails, and standards
• Manage and support Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud environments
• Provide production and client support for Kafka-based applications
• Perform incident management, troubleshooting, and issue resolution, taking accountability for platform outages
• Develop new services, platform enhancements, and automation
• Design and engineer solutions for streaming and cloud environments
• Develop Proofs-of-Concept (POCs) for new technologies and capabilities
• Participate in code reviews and technical discussions
• Collaborate with application and engineering teams to resolve complex issues
• Coach and provide technical guidance to junior team members
• Contribute to Agile Scrum ceremonies and team knowledge-sharing activities
• Support monitoring, alerting, logging, and overall platform reliability

Skills

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or another related quantitative business field (equivalent practical experience may be considered in place of a degree)
• 4–6 years of related professional experience required
• Apache Kafka Administration – Strong hands-on experience administering Kafka platforms
• AWS – Experience working with AWS cloud services and cloud-based platforms
• Event-Driven Architecture – Experience designing or supporting event-driven and event-streaming solutions
• Confluent Platform/Confluent Cloud – Experience administering or supporting Confluent environments
• DevOps/CI/CD – Experience with automation, deployment pipelines, and DevOps practices
• Cloud Engineering – Experience supporting cloud-based infrastructure and services
• Monitoring, Alerting & Logging – Experience with enterprise monitoring and logging tools
• NoSQL Databases – Experience with NoSQL technologies
• Dynatrace preferred
• Splunk preferred
• MongoDB preferred
• CISSP certification is preferred
• Experience developing automation and platform services
• Experience with Proof-of-Concept development

Company Overview