Prabhat Kumar

Kafka / Confluent Platform Administrator with 5+ years of Kafka operations experience and 11+ years in IT. Expert in full-stack Confluent cluster management — security hardening (SSL/TLS, mTLS, SASL, RBAC), in-place upgrades, DR cluster setup with Cluster Linking, and IBM MQ Kafka Connect deployments. Hands-on with Ansible/Puppet automation, HashiCorp Vault, JFrog Artifactory, Prometheus, Grafana & Control Center observability.

Kafka / Confluent Platform Administrator - HCLTech Ltd - Bangalore, India

(2025-03)

Client: StateFarm (US Insurance)

• Installed, configured, and managed Confluent Platform clusters end-to-end — brokers, Zookeeper/KRaft, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, REST Proxy, and Control Center in production.
• Deployed IBM MQ Kafka Connect pipeline end-to-end: connector config, GitLab CI/CD pipeline build, testing, and production rollout with zero data loss.
• Implemented full security hardening: SSL/TLS, mTLS, SASL/PLAIN, SASL/SCRAM, SASL/GSSAPI (Kerberos) across all Confluent components.
• Configured Confluent RBAC: role bindings, principal assignments, and least-privilege ACL policies across topics, Schema Registry, and Connect clusters.
• Executed in-place Confluent Platform version upgrades with pre-check, rollback planning, and post-upgrade validation — zero downtime achieved.
• Managed GitLab Kafka project: pipeline-as-code, MR governance, branch protection, and version-controlled config changes.
• Built Confluent Docker image pipeline with Trivy vulnerability scanning; managed versioned artifacts via JFrog Artifactory.
• Configured environments using Ansible playbooks with Jinja2 templates for broker properties, SSL certs, and Connect worker configs.
• Applied Puppet code changes for broker configuration, file deployments, and service management across production and DR nodes.
• Set up DR cluster with Confluent Cluster Linking for real-time topic mirroring — near-zero RPO fault-tolerant failover.
• Monitored clusters via Confluent Control Center, Prometheus & Grafana: consumer lag, throughput, partition leadership, under-replicated partitions, and automated alerting.
• Integrated HashiCorp Vault for dynamic SSL certs, SASL credentials, and Kafka Connect secrets via Vault Agent and Jinja2 templating.
• Performed Linux server administration: diagnosed and resolved disk I/O, CPU saturation, and memory pressure on Confluent broker nodes.
• Managed change requests and P1/P2 incident management: end-to-end CR lifecycle, RCA documentation, and SLA-compliant resolution.

Kafka Administrator / DevOps Engineer - Infosys Ltd - Bangalore, India

(2022-07 - 2025-03)

Project: GST Platform

• Administered Kafka clusters in production: managed brokers, topics, partitions, consumer groups, and Zookeeper for high-throughput GST streaming pipelines.
• Configured SSL/TLS and SASL/SCRAM for broker and client auth; enforced ACL-based topic-level access control.
• Built Jenkins CI/CD pipelines for Kafka connector deployment; managed GitLab repositories for Kafka configs and pipeline-as-code.
• Automated configuration using Ansible playbooks: broker properties, keystore/truststore deployment, and rolling restarts for cert rotation.
• Monitored cluster health via Prometheus, Grafana, and Control Center: consumer lag, JVM metrics, disk, and replication health with alerting.
• Managed Docker image builds with vulnerability scanning; published versioned artifacts to image registry.
• Participated in ISO 27001 external security audit; implemented controls and maintained compliance documentation.
• Handled change requests & P1/P2 incidents: RCA, SSL certificate renewals, config changes resolved within SLA.
• Performed Linux administration: resolved disk I/O, CPU, and memory bottlenecks on Kafka nodes using shell scripting and system diagnostics.

Big Data Administrator - Empasys Info Solution Pvt Ltd - Bangalore, India

(2021-09 - 2022-06)

Client: Infosys

• Managed Hadoop cluster (HDFS, YARN, Hive, HBase, Kafka, Spark, Oozie) in production; handled Kafka topic management and topology rebalancing.
• Collaborated with Linux teams for OS patching, security updates, and capacity planning.

System Infrastructure Development Engineer - CDN Networks - Mumbai, India

(2017-08 - 2021-06)

• Set up Hadoop clusters from scratch: Kerberos configuration, performance tuning, and Oozie workflow scheduling.
• Managed 3-tier data center infrastructure end-to-end: upgrades, installation, and Linux server migration.

NOC Engineer - Anunta Technology - Mumbai, India

(2015-03 - 2017-07)

• Monitored network devices and backbone links; troubleshot BGP and OSPF routing and LAN/WAN infrastructure issues.

Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) - Electronics - Gaikwad-Patil College of Engineering (2013)