Platform Engineer III

Job Title: Platform Engineer III - Kafka (AWS, MSK, Terraform, DevOps)

Location: Cincinnati, OH

Duration: Travel - 9 months

Pay Range: $80/hr (W2)

Job ID: 371715

About BCforward

BCforward is a leading global IT consulting and workforce solutions firm providing services and support to Fortune 500 and government clients. Founded in 1998, BCforward has grown with our customers needs into a full-service business solutions provider. With delivery centers and offices across North America and India, we take pride in building long-term relationships and delivering excellence through innovation, collaboration, and integrity.

Job Description

We are seeking a hands-on Platform Engineer III to own and scale our enterprise event-driven architecture on Amazon MSK within AWS. The ideal candidate will have strong experience in Kafka platform engineering, AWS networking and security, Terraform-based infrastructure as code, and DevOps automation, with a proven ability to deliver reliable, secure, and observable Kafka services across hybrid cloud environments.

Responsibilities:

• Operate and support Amazon MSK in production environments.
• Design and manage multi-AZ and multi-region Kafka architectures for high availability and resiliency.
• Define topic design, partitioning strategies, retention policies, and capacity plans.
• Troubleshoot consumer lag, rebalancing events, broker performance, and throughput bottlenecks.
• Manage Schema Registry and enforce schema governance standards.
• Deploy and manage Kafka Connect clusters and configure source and sink connectors.
• Support real-time integrations with Snowflake and other enterprise systems.
• Build and maintain Terraform modules for MSK, networking, IAM, security groups, and related AWS services.
• Automate environment provisioning and configuration across dev, test, and prod using IaC practices.
• Integrate Kafka and infrastructure changes into CI/CD pipelines.
• Implement monitoring and observability with CloudWatch, Prometheus, Dynatrace, or similar tools.
• Administer Kafka ACLs, IAM integrations, encryption, and secrets management aligned to enterprise policies.

Required Skills & Qualifications:

• Production ownership of Amazon MSK or self-managed Kafka, including multi-AZ and multi-region design.
• Expertise in Kafka operations: topic design, partitioning, retention, consumer groups, rebalancing, and performance tuning.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka Connect, connector configuration, and troubleshooting.
• Advanced Terraform skills including modules, state management, lifecycle meta-arguments, and remote backends.
• Strong AWS knowledge: VPC, subnets, security groups, IAM, and related networking and security concepts.
• Experience integrating infrastructure and Kafka changes into CI/CD workflows.
• Monitoring and observability experience with CloudWatch, Prometheus, Dynatrace, or similar tooling.
• Security mindset with Kafka ACLs, IAM integration, encryption, and secrets management in regulated environments.
• Experience level: 5+ years in platform or site reliability roles with direct Kafka ownership.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience integrating Kafka with Snowflake and other enterprise data platforms.
• Background in hybrid cloud operations and enterprise governance frameworks.

Why BCforward?

At BCforward, we believe in advancing lives and careers. When you join our team, you gain access to:

• Competitive compensation and benefits.
• Opportunities for growth with global clients.
• A supportive, inclusive culture that values innovation and people.
• Exposure to cutting-edge technologies and projects.

About Our Commitment

BCforward is an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status.

What We Are Not Seeking

• Application developers who have only produced or consumed messages without platform ownership.
• Pure DevOps engineers without deep Kafka experience.
• Theoretical knowledge without proven production support.

Interested? Apply Now!

If this sounds like the right opportunity for you, please apply with your most recent resume or contact:

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