Cloud Platform Developer

ONLY USC/GC - W2 ROLEMust Have Skills:⦁ Must have deep, hands‐on experience running Kafka in large‐scale production environments, including cluster operations, upgrades, patches, and migrations.⦁ Should understand Kafka internals such as partitions, replication, retention/compaction, and rebalance strategies.o Kafka Administrationo Platform / SRE / DevOps Experienceo Kafka Ecosystem Toolso Linux + Networkingo Automation / Scriptingo Monitoring / Observabilityo Disaster RecoveryNice to Have Skills:⦁ AWS MSK / Apache Kafka Cloud: Experience with MSK operations and cloud‐aligned Kafka environments.⦁ Helpful for cross‐environment consistency between on‐prem and cloud.⦁ Hardware Refresh Experience: Prior work leading Kafka hardware refreshes or cluster rebuilds.Detailed Job Description:Minimum Qualifications- Education & Prior Job Experience:We're seeking a senior contract Kafka/Confluent administrator to own and evolve our on-prem event streaming platform, with a primary focus on Confluent Platform. You will lead planning and execution of a hardware refresh for our on-prem clusters, drive reliability and performance, and embed DevOps/automation across provisioning, deployment, observability, and incident response. Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK is desired for secondary support and cross-environment alignment. Comprehensive documentation and runbooks are required deliverables.Kafka Platform Support Key Responsibilities⦁ Design, deploy, and operate highly available Kafka clusters (on-prem, cloud, and/or managed services such as Confluent Cloud or AWS MSK).⦁ Manage topics, partitions, quotas, retention policies, and consumer group strategies for performance and cost.⦁ Own upgrades, patches, and migrations.⦁ Implement and manage Kafka components: Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker/Confluent Replicator, REST Proxy; familiarity with Kafka Streams and ksqlDB is a plus.⦁ Performance tuning (producers/consumers, batching, compression, acks, ISR, controller health), throughput testing, and benchmarking.⦁ Capacity planning, partitioning strategy, and cluster right-sizing.Contract Deliverables⦁ Hardware refresh plan: capacity model, sizing, architecture diagrams, migration/cutover strategy, risk register⦁ Implement and validated on-prem clusters on refreshed hardware with performance benchmarks⦁ Operational documentation: standards, runbooks, monitoring/alerts configuration, backup/restore and DR playbooks.⦁ Knowledge transfer sessions and documentation handoff at milestones and project close.Minimum Qualifications⦁ 5+ years in systems/platform engineering, SRE, or DevOps; 4+ years operating Kafka in production at scale.⦁ Deep knowledge of Kafka internals: partitions, replication, retention/compaction, rebalance strategies.⦁ Hands-on with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker/Confluent Replicator.⦁ Strong Linux fundamentals; networking (TCP, DNS, load balancing), and performance analysis.⦁ Proficiency in automation/scripting.⦁ Monitoring/observability: Data Dog, Grafana, JMX exporters, and log aggregation.⦁ Experience with DR, multi-region design, and incident management.⦁ Proven ability to produce clear, comprehensive documentationPreferred Qualifications⦁ Experience with Apache Kafka and AWS MSK operations and integration.⦁ Experience executing hardware refreshes mor major cluster rebuilds/migrations with minimal downtime.Minimum Years of Experience:⦁ 5+ yearsCertifications Needed:⦁ None