Data Platform SRE Kafka Platform Engineer

Job Title: Data Platform SRE / Kafka Platform Engineer

Location: Frisco TX

Duration: / Term: Contract

Experience Desired: 8 Years

Job Description:

• Support monitor and maintain microservices-based data platforms in production environments.
• Proactively monitor troubleshoot and resolve incidents across distributed systems and streaming platforms.
• Ensure high availability reliability and performance of Kafka-based ingestion and processing pipelines.
• Own operational readiness across non-production and production environments including: Start/stop procedures Dependency validation Release support
• Drive automation initiatives across: Deployments Vulnerability remediation Monitoring and alerting Operational recovery workflows

Required Technical Skills

• Strong programming expertise in Java and/or Python.
• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka including: Topics partitions brokers Consumer groups Kafka Connect Lag monitoring and alert handling
• Proven experience in microservices architecture (build support and troubleshooting).
• Solid understanding of SRE principles including: SLAs SLOs Incident response Threshold-based alerting Observability and system resilience
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and tools such as: Jenkins GitLab CI/CD Nexus Source control platforms (Git-based)
• Strong troubleshooting capability across logs metrics traces infrastructure dependencies and application failures.
• Kafka Platform Operations & Environment Readiness
• Experience with data ingestion mechanisms including Kafka SFTP and APIs.
• Knowledge of data formats such as JSON and Parquet.
• Ability to manage and operate: Kafka topic inventory Metadata/entity mapping Topic classifications (K0/K1/K2) Consumer group operations
• Experience with: Kafka backlog monitoring Alert triage and incident response
• Exposure to Cloudera-managed Kafka environments (preferred).
• Ability to validate end-to-end operational readiness of non-production environments for releases.
• Platform Infrastructure & Observability
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS or Azure).
• Hands-on knowledge of: Docker Kubernetes (AKS preferred)
• Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools: Grafana Prometheus Pushgateway Splunk
• Ability to validate: Dashboard ownership Log routing Reconciliation metrics Monitoring coverage
• Understanding of platform dependencies across: Jenkins Nexus GOGS Supporting infrastructure services
• Experience handling production incidents (P1/P2) and escalations.
• Strong exposure to: Root Cause Analysis (RCA) preparation Support runbook execution
• Familiarity with ServiceNow (or similar ticketing systems) and queue management workflows.

Good understanding of:

• Application runbooks (start/stop order escalation paths thresholds)
• Access governance (AD/IDM privileged access management)
• Change management processes and deployment ownership
• Exit procedures and access revocation controls

Key Skills:

Kafka SRE Microservices Platform Ops (AWS/Azure) Kubernetes CI/CD tools