Kafka Administrator || Mississauga, ON - Hybrid || Fulltime FTE

Kafka Administrator

Location: Mississauga, ON
Work Model: Hybrid
Employment Type: Full-Time (FTE)
Experience: 6 10 Years

Job Summary: We are seeking an experienced Kafka Administrator to manage, maintain, and optimize enterprise Apache Kafka environments. The ideal candidate will have strong expertise in Kafka administration, cluster management, performance tuning, security, monitoring, and production support within large-scale distributed systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Install, configure, administer, and maintain Apache Kafka clusters across Development, QA, UAT, and Production environments.
• Manage Kafka brokers, topics, partitions, replication factors, and consumer groups to ensure high availability and optimal performance.
• Monitor Kafka cluster health, resource utilization, and capacity using enterprise monitoring tools.
• Perform performance tuning, capacity planning, and cluster scaling to support growing workloads.
• Troubleshoot Kafka infrastructure, messaging, connectivity, and performance-related issues, and perform root cause analysis.
• Configure and manage Kafka security, including SSL/TLS, SASL authentication, ACLs, and encryption.
• Administer Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and related ecosystem components.
• Implement and support High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions.
• Execute Kafka upgrades, patching, migrations, and platform maintenance with minimal business impact.
• Collaborate with application, infrastructure, DevOps, and data engineering teams to onboard and support Kafka-based applications.
• Develop and maintain operational runbooks, support documentation, and architecture documentation.
• Configure monitoring, logging, alerting, and incident management processes.
• Support production deployments, release activities, and environment readiness.
• Automate operational and administrative tasks using Shell or Python scripting.
• Ensure compliance with enterprise security, governance, audit, and regulatory standards.
• Participate in production support and on-call rotation for critical incidents.
• Drive continuous improvements to enhance platform reliability, scalability, security, and operational efficiency.

Required Skills

• Apache Kafka Administration
• Kafka Cluster Installation, Configuration & Management
• Kafka Broker Administration
• Topic, Partition & Replication Management
• Consumer Group Management
• Kafka Connect
• Schema Registry
• Kafka Performance Tuning
• Kafka Security (SSL/TLS, SASL, ACLs)
• High Availability (HA) & Disaster Recovery (DR)
• Capacity Planning & Cluster Scaling
• Linux/Unix Administration
• Shell Scripting (Bash)
• Python Scripting
• Troubleshooting & Root Cause Analysis
• Log Analysis & Performance Optimization
• Production Support & Incident Management
• Distributed Systems & Event-Driven Architecture

Monitoring & Observability Tools

Experience with one or more of the following:

• Prometheus
• Grafana
• Splunk
• ELK Stack
• Datadog

Preferred Qualifications

• 6 10 years of overall IT experience.
• 3 5+ years of hands-on Apache Kafka Administration experience.
• Experience working with enterprise-scale Kafka platforms in Production environments.
• Strong problem-solving, analytical, and troubleshooting skills.
• Excellent communication and collaboration abilities.
• Experience working in Agile and DevOps environments is preferred.

Soft Skills

• Strong teamwork and collaboration skills.
• Self-motivated with a willingness to learn new technologies.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced production support environment.