Centurion is looking for a Senior Kafka Admin with Ansible for our federal government client.  This is a long term position that is 100% onsite in Woodlawn, MD.

Key Required Skills:

Kafka Architecture, Ansible Automation, RHEL/Linux Administration, Scripting (Bash, Shell, Python), Availability Monitoring / Triage (Splunk, Dynatrace, Prometheus).

Position Description:

• Architect, design, develop, and implement next-generation data streaming and event-based architecture / platform using software engineering best practices in the latest technologies:

o Data Streaming, Event Driven Architecture, Event Processing Frameworks
o DevOps (Jenkins, Red Hat OpenShift, Docker, SonarQube)
o Infrastructure-as-Code and Configuration-as-Code (Ansible, Terraform / CloudFormation, Scripting)

• Administer Kafka including automating, installing, migrating, upgrading, deploying, troubleshooting, and configuring on Linux.
• Provide expertise in one or more of these areas: Kafka administration, event-driven architecture, automation, application integration, monitoring and alerting, security, business process management/business rules processing, CI/CD pipeline and containerization, or data ingestion/data modeling.
• Investigate, repair, and actively ensure business continuity regardless of impacted component: Kafka Platform, business logic, middleware, networking, CI/CD pipeline, or database (PL/SQL and Data Modeling).
• Brief management, customer, team, or vendors using written or oral skills at appropriate technical level for audience
• All other duties as assigned or directed

Skills Requirements:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering or a related field.
• Masters or Doctorate degree may substitute for required experience
• 8+ years of combined experience with Site Reliability Engineering, providing DevOps support, and/or RHEL administration for mission-critical platforms, ideally Kafka.
• 4+ years of combined experience with Kafka (Confluent Kafka, Apache Kafka, Amazon MSK)
• 4+ years of experience with Ansible automation
• Must be able to obtain and maintain a Public Trust. Contract requirement.
• ** Selected candidate must be willing to work on-site in Woodlawn, MD 5 days a week.
• Strong experience with Ansible Automation and authoring playbooks and roles for installing, maintaining, or upgrading platforms
• Solid experience using version control software such as Git/Bitbucket including peer reviewing Ansible playbooks
• Hands-on experience administrating Kafka platform (Confluent Kafka, Apache Kafka, Amazon MSK) via Ansible playbooks or other automation.
• Understanding of Kafka architecture, including partition strategy, replication, transactions, tiered storage, and disaster recovery strategies.
• Strong experience in automating tasks with scripting languages like Bash, Shell, or Python
• Solid foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) administration
• Basic networking skills
• Solid experience triaging and monitoring complex issues, outages, and incidents
• Experience with integrating/maintaining various 3rd party tools like ZooKeeper, Flink, Pinot, Prometheus, and Grafana.
• Experience with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) using Red Hat OpenShift/Kubernetes and Docker containers
• Experience working on Agile projects and understanding Agile terminology.

Desired:

• Preferred Confluent Certified Administrator for Apache Kafka (CCAAK) or Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka (CCDAK)
• Practical experience with event-driven applications and at least one event processing framework, such as Kafka Streams, Apache Flink, or ksqlDB.
• Understanding of Domain Driven Design (DDD) and experience applying DDD patterns in software development.
• Experience working with Kafka connectors and/or supporting operation of the Kafka Connect API
• Experience with Avro / JSON data serialization and schema governance with Confluent Schema Registry.
• Preferred experience with AWS cloud technologies or other cloud providers; AWS cloud certifications.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (CloudFormation / Terraform, Scripting)
• Solid knowledge of relational databases (PostgreSQL, DB2, or Oracle), NoSQL databases (MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB), SQL, or/and ORM technologies (JPA2, Hibernate, or Spring JPA)
• Knowledge of Social Security Administration (SSA)

Education:

• Bachelor's Degree with 7+ years of experience
• Must be able to obtain and maintain a Public Trust. Contract requirement.