Kafka Admin Lead in London

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 (e.g., 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 lifecycle 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.