What are the responsibilities and job description for the Systems Engineer III (Kafka Admin) position at Charter Communications?
JOB SCOPE
Responsible for assisting in the configuration and maintenance of enterprise-wide Data as a Service (DaaS) Kafka clusters. Responsible for administration of DaaS applications supporting all Charter Divisions. Will participate in full life-cycle of systems engineering activities of high-quality, scalable solutions.
MAJOR DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
- Actively and consistently support all efforts to simplify and enhance the customer experience.
- Coordinates with internal departments to review existing integration capabilities, data sources, and proposed solution designs for feasibility, cost and functionality.
- Installs, administers, configures and maintains Kafka clusters, including operating systems and related software.
- Manage Kafka broker configurations, topics, partitions, retention policies, and access control.
- Monitors cluster performance, availability, and health.
- Configures and maintains Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, ksqlDB, REST Proxy, and Kafka Streams components.
- Implements and manages security (TLS/SSL, SASL, ACL, RBAC, etc) and compliance policies.
- Provides 'on call' support to resolve DaaS application issues after normal business hours.
- Uses established change management processes, requiring operational procedures be performed with minimal customer impact, (i.e. during established maintenance window).
- Works with Telemetry, DevOps, SRE, and development teams to ensure smooth Kafka integration and operations.
- Documents systems configurations and upgrades.
- Designs and implements change and control policies and disaster recovery plans; lead troubleshooting efforts to restore functionality in the event of an outage.
- Perform other duties as requested by supervisor.
REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS
Required Skills/Abilities and Knowledge
- Ability to read, write, speak and understand English.
- Advanced ability to support Confluent and Apache Kafka.
- Advanced knowledge of Kafka internals – brokers, zookeepers, KRaft, partitions, offsets, consumer groups.
- Experience with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and Kafka security configurations.
- Advanced ability to follow and implement established change and control policies and procedures.
- Advanced ability to troubleshoot application problems.
- Knowledge of network and systems engineering systems concepts and system/super-system skills, including NetApp Clustered On-TAP, Cisco UCS, and VMWare systems.
- Proficiency with Linux systems administration and container technologies.
- Proficiency in scripting languages (Shell, Python, Ansible) for automation.
- Experience with monitoring and alerting tools (Grafana, Prometheus, Data Dog).
Required Education
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience; May require Industry Standard Certifications
Required Related Work Experience and Number of Years
- Network application work experience - 4
- System Administration work experience - 3
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
Preferred Skills/Abilities and Knowledge
- Knowledge of zookeeper operations, upgrades, and migration of Kraft mode.
- Knowledge of Kubernetes concepts and container runtimes.
- Familiarity with Kafka multi-DC replication (MirrorMaker 2 or Confluent Replicator).
- Experience with cloud-based Kafka deployments
Preferred Related Work Experience and Number of Years
- Network OSS application work experience - 6
- System Administration work experience - 5
