Remote DevOps Engineer (Kafka/Kong)

Pennant Solutions is seeking a skilled and experienced Senior Kafka/Kong Administrator to join their IT operations team. The role involves the deployment, configuration, maintenance, and monitoring of Kafka clusters and Kong gateways, ensuring high availability and optimal performance of real-time platforms.

Responsibilities:

• Deploy and configure Kafka clusters following best practices for scalability, security, and performance
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to gather requirements and design Kafka infrastructure to meet data streaming needs
• Manage topics, partitions, replication factors, and broker configurations to ensure efficient data distribution and fault tolerance
• Implement monitoring and alerting solutions to proactively identify and address performance bottlenecks, resource constraints, and anomalies
• Conduct regular performance testing, load testing, and capacity planning to ensure clusters can handle anticipated workloads
• Design and implement high-availability strategies, including failover mechanisms and data replication across multiple data centers or cloud regions
• Develop and maintain disaster recovery plans and procedures to minimize data loss and downtime in the event of failures
• Implement and manage security measures such as encryption, authentication, and authorization to ensure data privacy and compliance with industry standards
• Stay updated on security vulnerabilities and patches, applying necessary updates to maintain a secure Kafka environment
• Diagnose and resolve Kafka-related issues, including performance degradation, data loss, and connectivity problems
• Collaborate with development and data engineering teams to troubleshoot consumer/producer application integration with Kafka
• Maintain thorough documentation of Kafka configurations, deployment processes, and troubleshooting procedures
• Provide training and knowledge sharing sessions to junior team members and other stakeholders
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including data engineers, developers, and system administrators, to ensure smooth integration of Kafka into our data ecosystem
• Communicate effectively with stakeholders to provide updates on Kafka performance, maintenance, and improvements
• Hands on experience installing and configuring Kong API Gateway as well as integration with existing API frameworks
• Describe and configure dataplane security using RBAC, Roles, Workspaces and Teams
• Configure upstreams and load balancing
• Create Services, Routes, and Consumers
• Working knowledge of Kong Ingress with Kubernetes\Dockers
• Excellent knowledge of API design standards, patterns, and best practices especially with OpenAPI 2.0, REST, JSON, XML
• Distinguish between downstream and upstream networking issues
• Collecting troubleshooting/debug information
• Using log files and health and traffic metrics

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field (or equivalent work experience)
• 5+ years of hands-on experience in administering Apache Kafka clusters in production environments
• 5+ years proficiency in Kafka/Kong architecture, installation, configuration, and tuning
• Strong understanding of Kafka internals, including topics, partitions, replication, and consumer/producer APIs
• 5+ years of experience with Kafka ecosystem tools such as Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, and Schema Registry
• Knowledge of Linux systems and shell scripting
• Strong DevOps background
• 5+ years of familiarity with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) and containerization (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes)
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to troubleshoot complex issues efficiently
• Strong communication skills and the ability to work collaboratively in a team environment
• Certification as a Confluent Certified Administrator for Apache Kafka (CCAAK)
• Preferred certification in Kong Gateway Certified Associate (KGCA)