Senior Kafka Administator

We are looking for an experienced Senior Kafka Administrator to join our team and manage our distributed Kafka ecosystem. The ideal candidate will be responsible for configuring, managing, and troubleshooting Kafka clusters to ensure high availability, data integrity, and security. The Senior Kafka Administrator will implement industry best practices for disaster recovery, monitoring, and securing Kafka environments. In this role, you will also collaborate with development teams to ensure Kafka meets business requirements while optimizing performance, maintainability, reliability, and scalability.

The duties of this position require a high level of technical expertise, particularly in ensuring the stability, security, and efficiency of Kafka environments. You will be expected to implement strategies that maximize Kafka's performance and resilience, while maintaining established standards of quality, data encryption, and access control.

Key Responsibilities

· Kafka Cluster Configuration and Management:

o Design, install, configure, and manage Kafka clusters, including brokers, ZooKeeper, Kafka Connect, and Kafka Streams.

• Optimize Kafka infrastructure to ensure high availability, scalability, and low latency.

· High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR):

o Implement high availability configurations for Kafka to minimize downtime.

• Design and implement disaster recovery strategies, ensuring data replication and failover mechanisms are functioning properly.
• Backup and Restore Strategies:
• Set up and maintain Kafka backup procedures to ensure data integrity and availability.
• Regularly test restore processes to verify that backups are viable and complete.
• Security and Encryption:
• Ensure Kafka is secured, including encrypting data at rest and in transit.
• Implement access control mechanisms, including SSL/TLS encryption and client authentication using Kerberos or SASL.
• Monitor and address security vulnerabilities, ensuring Kafka complies with industry security standards.
• Monitoring and Optimization:
• Monitor the health and performance of Kafka clusters, ensuring that alerts and logs are actively tracked for any anomalies.
• Tune Kafka parameters to enhance throughput, latency, and reliability.
• Utilize tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, or similar to monitor Kafka infrastructure.
• Maintenance and Troubleshooting:
• Perform routine maintenance, including upgrading Kafka brokers, patches, and handling schema updates.
• Troubleshoot Kafka-related issues such as performance degradation, replication lag, and consumer/producer errors.
• Collaboration and Documentation:
• Collaborate with software engineering, DevOps, and other stakeholders to integrate Kafka into the broader system architecture.
• Document Kafka cluster configurations, procedures, and best practices.

· Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.

· 3+ years of experience in managing and administering Apache Kafka in a production environment.

· Strong knowledge of Kafka architecture, including brokers, ZooKeeper, Kafka Connect, and Kafka Streams.

· Experience in high availability and disaster recovery configurations for Kafka clusters.

· Experience with security best practices, including SSL/TLS encryption, SASL, and Kerberos.

· Proficiency in monitoring Kafka with tools like Prometheus, Grafana, or similar.

· Solid understanding of distributed systems, networking, and data flow management.

· Strong problem-solving and troubleshooting skills.

· Excellent communication skills (written and verbal).

• Opportunity to work on cutting-edge cloud-based healthcare solutions
• Base compensation for this role is $115,000-$130,000 per year.
• Work from your home company with a one-time home office stipend
• Excellent benefits package that includes health, vision and dental coverage for you, your spouse and dependents
• Additional benefits, including a monthly wellness stipend and internet stipend, 401K w/ a match; immediately vested, employee assistance program, disability insurance, and parental leave
• 15 days to unlimited PTO based on YOS plus 9 additional holidays
• An opportunity for you to be part of a team committed to improving healthcare access and affordability by leveraging innovative technology solutions

Join Softheon, and together, we'll shape the future of healthcare in America.

Are you ready to make a difference? Join us at Softheon and help revolutionize healthcare for all.

At Softheon, we embrace and celebrate diversity in all its forms as an equal opportunity employer. We strongly believe that employing a diverse workforce is key to our success. Our recruitment and hiring decisions are made solely on the basis of each candidate's qualifications, experience, and skills. We highly appreciate your dedication to our shared mission of making healthcare affordable, accessible, and abundant for all. Join us in our journey towards continually building a diverse and inclusive workplace, where everyone’s contributions are valued, respected, and celebrated.

Employment with Softheon is at-will, which means either the employee or Softheon may terminate the employment relationship at any time, with or without cause, and with or without notice. Nothing in this job description or in any document or statement shall be construed to constitute a guarantee of employment for a specified period of time.