Kafka Administrator with Bash Scripting - NYC, NY

Client is looking for a highly skilled Kafka Administrator with 8 to 10 years of hands-on experience in Kafka infrastructure management and Bash scripting . The candidate will play a key role in the setup, administration, and optimization of large-scale Kafka environments, ensuring performance, security, and high availability in a mission-critical enterprise environment.

• End-to-end administration and support of Apache Kafka clusters , brokers, topics, and Zookeeper

• Design and implement Kafka multi-cluster and high-availability environments

• Develop and maintain robust Bash scripts to automate deployment, monitoring, and maintenance tasks

• Implement and manage Kafka security protocols (TLS/SSL, SASL, Kerberos, ACLs)

• Monitor Kafka performance and usage using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk

• Perform capacity planning, tuning, and upgrades for Kafka and supporting tools

• Proactively identify system bottlenecks and troubleshoot complex issues related to Kafka messaging

• Collaborate with data engineering, DevOps, and application teams to integrate Kafka into pipelines

• Ensure compliance with enterprise standards, audits, and operational procedures

• 8 10 years of experience in Linux system administration, scripting, and distributed systems

• 5+ years of hands-on experience with Kafka administration in production environments

• Advanced Bash scripting skills for automation and log processing

• Strong knowledge of Kafka internals (brokers, producers/consumers, partitions, offsets, retention policies)

• Expertise in managing Kafka at scale (multi-data center setups, failover strategies)

• Experience with Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, Schema Registry

• Deep understanding of Zookeeper architecture and management

• Familiarity with monitoring and alerting tools (Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, ELK)

• Proficient in troubleshooting Kafka cluster health and end-to-end message delivery issues

• Experience with Confluent Kafka platform

• Knowledge of DevOps tools (Ansible, Terraform, Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes)

• Exposure to cloud platforms like AWS MSK , Azure Event Hubs, or GCP Pub/Sub

• Programming knowledge in Python or Java is a plus

• Certifications like Confluent Certified Administrator or CKA are an advantage

• Bachelor s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline

• Master s degree preferred but not mandatory