Job Title: Kafka Administrator (L2 Support)

Experience: 5-10 Years

Location: Hyderabad & Bengaluru

Employment Type: Full-Time

Job Summary:

We are seeking an experienced Kafka Administrator (Tier-2 Support) to join our Platform Engineering team. The ideal candidate will possess strong expertise in Apache Kafka Administration, AWS Cloud, Kubernetes, and Linux Administration. The role involves managing, monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimizing Kafka clusters in a highly available production environment while providing L2 operational support.

Key Responsibilities

Administer, maintain, and support Apache Kafka clusters in production environments.
Provide Tier-2 operational support, incident resolution, and problem management for Kafka platforms.
Monitor Kafka cluster health, performance, capacity, and availability.
Perform Kafka broker provisioning, configuration, upgrades, patching, and decommissioning activities.
Troubleshoot issues related to Kafka brokers, producers, consumers, topics, partitions, and replication.
Manage Kafka security including SSL, SASL, ACLs, and authentication mechanisms.
Support Kafka deployments on Kubernetes platforms.
Work with AWS services to support and optimize cloud-based Kafka infrastructure.
Administer and troubleshoot Linux servers hosting Kafka workloads.
Develop and maintain operational runbooks, SOPs, and technical documentation.
Participate in on-call support rotations and handle critical production incidents.
Collaborate with application teams, DevOps engineers, and infrastructure teams to ensure platform reliability and scalability.
Perform capacity planning, performance tuning, and proactive monitoring of Kafka environments.

Required Skills

Kafka Administration

5+ years of hands-on experience with Apache Kafka Administration.
Experience managing large-scale Kafka clusters in production.
Strong understanding of Kafka architecture, topics, partitions, replication, consumer groups, and ZooKeeper/KRaft.
Experience with Kafka performance tuning and troubleshooting.

AWS Cloud

Experience with AWS services such as:
EC2
EKS
VPC
IAM
CloudWatch
S3
Knowledge of cloud networking and security concepts.

Kubernetes

Hands-on experience with Kubernetes cluster operations.
Experience deploying and managing Kafka workloads on Kubernetes.
Knowledge of Helm charts, ConfigMaps, Secrets, StatefulSets, and Operators.

Linux Administration

Strong experience administering Linux environments (RHEL/CentOS/Ubuntu).
Expertise in shell scripting and system troubleshooting.
Experience handling log analysis, performance monitoring, and OS tuning.

Preferred Skills

Experience with Confluent Platform.
Knowledge of Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and ksqlDB.
Experience with monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, ELK, or Datadog.
Exposure to Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible).
Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices.

Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
5-10 years of overall IT experience.
Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and communication skills.
Experience working in 24x7 production support environments.

Kafka Admin - Tier 2

Kafka Admin