Kafka Admin Lead-6months-London

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

Job description:

Role Title: Kafka Admin Lead

Minimum years of experience: 12+ years

Responsibilities

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Required Skills & Experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preferrable

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

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