Kafka Administrator (Ansible) - Woodlawn, MD | Onsite 5 days/week

Location: Woodlawn, MD | Onsite 5 days/week
Interview: In-person interview required

Key Requirements:
Bachelor's degree + 7 years of experience
Strong experience administering Confluent Kafka clusters in production
Proven experience automating Kafka deployment and operations using Ansible
Extensive experience developing and troubleshooting Ansible playbooks, roles, and modules
Experience designing idempotent and scalable automation
Experience with Ansible Tower/AWX
Experience integrating automation with CI/CD and Git workflows
Strong Python and Bash scripting experience
Hands-on Linux experience including SELinux, systemd, permissions, and networking
Experience securing Kafka environments using SSL/TLS, SASL, RBAC, and MDS
Experience with Prometheus, Thanos, and Grafana
Experience diagnosing Kafka performance, replication, partitioning, and consumer-lag issues
Experience managing Kafka topics, schemas, and connector integrations
Experience with Ansible Vault and secure secrets management
Experience automating hybrid Linux/Windows/cloud infrastructure
Experience with Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, and Git
Ability to develop enterprise-grade automation solutions
Ability to convert manual processes into automated workflows
Preferred Experience:
Confluent Cloud or hybrid Kafka architectures
Kafka Raft Metadata Mode (KRaft) and migration from ZooKeeper
Kubernetes-based Kafka deployments such as Strimzi and Confluent Operator
Performance tuning involving I/O, JVM, and networking
Federal compliance/security frameworks
AWS, Azure, or GovCloud