• Design, build, administer, and maintain Kafka clusters across development, test, and production environments. • Manage Kafka topics, partitions, brokers, replication, retention policies, and access controls. • Monitor Kafka performance, availability, throughput, and latency; proactively identify and resolve issues. • Perform capacity planning, tuning, upgrades, patching, and disaster recovery planning for Kafka environments. • Implement and maintain high availability and fault-tolerant Kafka configurations. • Develop and support event streaming pipelines using Kafka for real-time and near-real-time data processing. • Integrate Kafka with API Gateway (APIGW)–based microservices and downstream backend systems. • Design and implement Kafka producers, consumers, and connectors (e.g., Kafka Connect) to support system integrations and ETL/data movement needs. • Collaborate with application teams to define event schemas, topics, and data contracts. • Ensure reliable message delivery, data integrity, and error handling across streaming workflows. • Implement Kafka security best practices, including authentication, authorization, encryption in transit, and auditing. • Ensure Kafka implementations comply with CMS security, data governance, and operational standards. • Support DevSecOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code approaches where applicable. • Participate in incident response, root cause analysis, and operational readiness activities. • Document Kafka architectures, configurations, operational procedures, and integration patterns. • Provide technical guidance, troubleshooting support, and knowledge transfer to internal teams.