This is a 6-month contract role for a Kafka Administrator based on-site in Woodlawn, Maryland, working 5 days per week at SSA HQ. The position focuses on administering Confluent Kafka environments, implementing secure and scalable automation, maintaining observability platforms, and ensuring reliable distributed system operations across multiple environments. Responsibilities Administer production Confluent Kafka clusters, including brokers, ZooKeeper/KRaft, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, KSQL, and Control Center. Deploy, configure, upgrade, and maintain Kafka clusters using Ansible automation. Develop, maintain, and troubleshoot Ansible playbooks, roles, and modules for provisioning, configuration management, deployment, and patching. Design idempotent Ansible automation for consistent multi-environment operations. Use Ansible Tower/AWX for workflow orchestration, scheduling, credential management, and RBAC. Integrate automation with CI/CD pipelines and Git workflows. Write and maintain Bash and Python scripts to support operational automation. Manage Linux environments including users/groups, permissions, SELinux, systemd services, and network configuration. Implement Kafka security including SSL/TLS, SASL, RBAC, and MDS. Architect, deploy, and maintain observability platforms: Prometheus, Thanos, and Grafana. Build custom dashboards, alerts, and high-availability monitoring configurations. Automate observability stack deployment and configuration using Ansible. Troubleshoot Kafka replication, partitioning, consumer lag, and performance issues using observability data. Manage Kafka topic lifecycle and connector integrations (IBM MQ, JDBC, Datagen). Apply secure automation practices including Ansible Vault and external vault integrations. Troubleshoot Ansible-related automation and infrastructure issues across distributed systems. Automate infrastructure tasks across Linux, Windows, and cloud platforms. Integrate automation with DevOps tools such as Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, and Git. Develop custom automation components using Python, Bash, or similar scripting languages. Recommend infrastructure and automation improvements based on environment assessments. Migrate manual processes into fully automated workflows. Provide technical guidance, training, and best practices to engineering teams on Ansible automation. Qualifications Required Bachelor's degree plus 7 years of relevant experience. Strong experience administering Confluent Kafka clusters in production environments. Proven experience automating Kafka deployment and operations using Ansible. Extensive experience developing and debugging Ansible playbooks, roles, and modules. Demonstrated ability to design idempotent and scalable automation for multi-environment deployments. Experience with Ansible Tower/AWX for enterprise automation. Proficiency integrating automation with CI/CD and Git workflows. Strong scripting experience with Python and Bash. Hands-on Linux experience including SELinux, systemd, permissions, and networking. Experience securing Kafka environments (SSL/TLS, SASL, RBAC, MDS). Experience with Prometheus, Thanos, and Grafana for monitoring distributed systems. Skill in diagnosing Kafka performance and operational issues using observability tools. Experience managing Kafka topics, schemas, and connector integrations. Experience implementing secure automation and secrets management with Ansible Vault. Experience automating infrastructure in hybrid Linux/Windows/cloud environments. Experience integrating automation with DevOps tools such as Jenkins, Docker, and Kubernetes.