Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator

Job overview

The Senior Kafka Engineer / Administrator role is hybrid, with listed work locations in Denver, Colorado, or St. Louis, Missouri. Pay is $40–$45 per hour on W-2. The role supports a migration of on-premises Kafka clusters to AWS MSK. This senior individual-contributor role owns day-to-day Kafka administration across on-premises and cloud environments and drives a low-risk migration. It coordinates platform and application teams to maintain reliable data streaming and a controlled cutover.

What you'll do

• Administer Kafka clusters across Cloudera, Confluent Platform, and AWS MSK
• manage topics, partitions, replication, retention, quotas, ACLs, and consumer groups
• tune brokers, producers, and consumers
• handle patching, upgrades, capacity planning, and troubleshooting
• maintain security configurations
• plan and execute migration to AWS MSK, validate data integrity, and prepare rollback plans
• build Terraform infrastructure and GitLab CI/CD pipelines
• maintain Datadog monitoring and alerting
• coordinate with producer and consumer teams on configuration, testing, and cutover.

What we're looking for

Skills & competencies

senior kafka engineer

kafka administrator

apache kafka

aws msk

cloudera

confluent

terraform

gitlab ci/cd

datadog

hybrid

denver co

st. louis mo

$40–$45/hr

generis tek

Work arrangement

• Weekend coverage required

Why this role

12-month contract-to-hire project. Requires 5+ years in data, platform, or infrastructure engineering and 4+ years operating Apache Kafka in production, plus Cloudera, Confluent, AWS MSK, Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, and Datadog experience.

About the employer

Generis Tek Inc. is hiring for this role. Industry: Executive Search Services. Sector: 56.