Kafka Administrator (Developers Don't Apply)

As a Kafka Administrator at our Merchant Ecommerce platform in Noida Sector 62, you will be responsible for managing, maintaining, and optimizing our distributed, multi-cluster Kafka infrastructure in an on-premise environment. You should have a deep understanding of Kafka internals, Zookeeper administration, and performance tuning to ensure operational excellence in high-throughput, low-latency production systems. Experience with API gateway operations (specifically Kong) and observability tooling is considered a plus. Your key responsibilities will include: - Managing multiple Kafka clusters with high-availability Zookeeper setups - Providing end-to-end operational support including deployment, configuration, and health monitoring of Kafka brokers and Zookeeper nodes - Conducting capacity planning, partition strategy optimization, and topic lifecycle management - Implementing backup and disaster recovery processes with defined RPO/RTO targets - Enforcing security configurations such as TLS encryption, authentication (SASL, mTLS), and ACL management - Optimizing Kafka producer and consumer performance to meet low-latency, high-throughput requirements - Planning and executing Kafka and Zookeeper upgrades and patching with minimal/zero downtime - Integrating Kafka with monitoring platforms like Prometheus, Grafana, or similar tools - Defining and enforcing log retention and archival policies in line with compliance requirements Additionally, you will be responsible for integrating Kafka metrics and logs with centralized observability and logging tools, creating dashboards and alerts to monitor Kafka consumer lag, partition health, and broker performance, and collaborating with DevOps/SRE teams to ensure visibility into Kafka services. You will also be involved in applying CIS benchmarks, performing automated security scans across Kafka nodes, managing secret and certificate rotation, supporting regular vulnerability assessments, and ensuring timely remediation. To be successful in this role, you should have: - 3+ years of hands-on Kafka administration experience in production environments - Strong understanding of Kafka internals and Zookeeper management - Experience in Kafka performance tuning, troubleshooting, and security mechanisms - Proficiency in monitoring and logging tools and scripting skills for operational automation Preferred qualifications include experience with API gateways, Kubernetes-based environments, compliance standards, security hardening practices, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools. In return, we offer you a mission-critical role in managing large-scale real-time data infrastructure, a flexible work environment, opportunities for growth, and access to modern observability and automation tools.,