Kafka Administrator

Spatial Front•Arlington, VA

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

Spatial Front, Inc. (SFI) —a two-time USA Today Top Workplaces awardee and Washington Post Top Workplaces honoree—is seeking a Kafka Administrator to join our growing team. The selected candidate will support the administration, sustainment, security, and continuous improvement of on-premises messaging and data integration infrastructure in a secure federal environment, with a focus on PeopleSoft HCM systems. This role centers on Apache Kafka administration across Linux and UNIX/Solaris environments. Responsibilities include ensuring platform reliability, maintaining secure operations, implementing monitoring solutions, automating processes, and optimizing system performance. The ideal candidate brings strong Kafka administration and troubleshooting expertise, proficiency in scripting, and a disciplined operational approach, along with experience supporting highly secure, compliance-driven networks.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field; equivalent relevant experience may be considered.
3+ years of systems, middleware, or platform administration experience, including at least 2 years supporting Apache Kafka or similar enterprise messaging and streaming platforms.
Hands-on experience administering on-premises Kafka environments on Linux, with familiarity supporting broader UNIX/Solaris infrastructure, including monitoring, patching, troubleshooting, and operational support.
Experience with Kafka administration best practices such as broker and topic management, replication and retention strategy, performance tuning, logging and monitoring, security configuration, and scripting or automation.
Must be a U.S. Citizen with an active Secret security clearance or the ability to obtain one; experience in secured federal or DoD environments preferred.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with PeopleSoft HCM architecture, interfaces, batch processing, and enterprise integration patterns.
Experience with Kafka security and operations concepts such as TLS/SSL, SASL, ACLs, certificate management, HA/DR, and consumer/producer troubleshooting.
Knowledge of runbooks, SOPs, change management, backup and recovery, incident management, problem management, and capacity planning for enterprise platforms.
Ability to collaborate across application, integration, data, security, and operations teams in a structured sustainment environment.

Responsibilities

Administer, monitor, and sustain Apache Kafka infrastructure supporting PeopleSoft HCM and related enterprise integrations in a secure, on-premises environment.
Install, configure, patch, upgrade, maintain, and troubleshoot Kafka brokers, clusters, topics, partitions, and supporting components across Linux and UNIX/Solaris-based environments.
Manage topic provisioning, replication, retention, consumer groups, access controls, certificates, and secure connectivity in accordance with enterprise security and operational requirements.
Develop and maintain scripts, automations, runbooks, and SOPs to improve platform reliability, reduce manual effort, and support repeatable administration.
Monitor cluster health, throughput, latency, consumer lag, disk utilization, JVM performance, logs, and alerts; investigate incidents and coordinate timely resolution.
Support platform hardening, audit readiness, change control, and compliance with security requirements in highly secured or DISA-aligned network environments.
Support high availability, backup and recovery, capacity planning, failover readiness, and environment support across development, test, and production.
Collaborate with application, middleware, ETL, database, infrastructure, and cybersecurity teams to support data movement, integration patterns, and stable operations.