Kafka Platform Engineer
$100,000–$150,000 year
Remote · United States
Job Summary
Kafka Platform Engineer needed to architect, deploy, and operate large-scale Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform environments across on-prem and cloud. You will own Kafka end-to-end — from cluster sizing and configuration to security, automation, observability, and developer enablement — partnering with product, design, engineering, and operations to deliver reliable, high-performing streaming platforms. Responsibilities include designing partitioning/replication/topic strategies, implementing strong Kafka security (SASL, mTLS, ACLs, RBAC), operating Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, KSQL/ksqlDB, and Kafka Streams, building Kafka Connect pipelines, designing HA/DR strategies (MirrorMaker 2, Cluster Linking, multi-region), building CI/CD pipelines with GitOps, implementing comprehensive observability with Prometheus/Grafana/Datadog/Confluent Control Center, optimizing costs and capacity, onboarding application teams, leading incident response and post-incident reviews, mentoring junior/mid engineers, maintaining architecture/runbooks/documentation, and evaluating new streaming technologies (Pulsar, Redpanda, AWS MSK, Azure Event Hubs). Requires strong Kafka internals knowledge, security expertise, Terraform/Ansible, Python/Bash/Go, and excellent troubleshooting and communication skills. Prefer Confluent Certified Administrator/Developer, Kubernetes experience, and exposure to managed Kafka services and data governance. This is a 100% remote, full-time W2 role with Bright Vision Technologies and involves a mandatory technical coding assessment.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline
- Five or more years of experience operating Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform in production
- Deep, hands-on knowledge of Kafka internals (partitions, replication, ISRs, consumer groups)
- Strong experience with Kafka security (SASL, mTLS, ACLs, RBAC)
- Hands-on experience with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and either Kafka Streams or ksqlDB
- Experience with HA/DR strategies for Kafka
- Strong scripting skills in Python, Bash, or Go
- Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible)
- Working knowledge of observability tooling for Kafka
- Excellent troubleshooting, communication, and documentation skills
Apply with one swipe on Sorce. We auto-fill applications and apply on your behalf — no cover letters, no 40-minute forms.
Hiring someone like this?
Get your role in front of qualified candidates on Sorce.