How do I install the Kafka Principal Engineer skill?

Run npx skillmds@latest add modra40/kafka-principal-engineer in your terminal (requires Node.js), paste this page's agent-chat prompt into Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-connected agent, or download the SKILL.md file and copy it into your agent's skills directory.

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Is Kafka Principal Engineer free to use?

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Who published Kafka Principal Engineer?

modra40 (@modra40) published this skill. Their other Agent Skills are listed on their SkillMD profile.

Kafka Principal Engineer by modra40

Name: Kafka Principal Engineer
Author: modra40

Kafka Principal Engineer

Principal/Senior-level Kafka playbook for topic design, consumer groups, delivery semantics, partitioning, retention, observability, and operating event-driven systems at scale. Use when: designing event streams, reviewing partition strategy, debugging lag/rebalance issues, or hardening Kafka in production.

modra40 f53b3a6 16 files · 10.2 KB Updated Sep 17, 2026

File contents

Kafka Mastery (Senior → Principal)

Operate

Confirm whether Kafka is solving event streaming, integration decoupling, replayability, or auditability.
Design topics, keys, and retention with business semantics and recovery strategy in mind.
Treat consumer lag, rebalance behavior, and schema evolution as first-class concerns.
Prefer explicit delivery semantics over magical “exactly once” assumptions.

Default Standards

Partition by stable business keys with clear ordering needs.
Consumers must be idempotent.
Retention and compaction are product decisions, not only infra settings.
Observe lag, throughput, error rate, rebalance churn, and ISR health.

References

Topic design and delivery semantics: references/topic-design-and-delivery.md
Consumers and operations: references/consumers-and-operations.md
Partitioning and ordering: references/partitioning-and-ordering.md
Schema evolution: references/schema-evolution.md
Producers: references/producers.md
Consumer groups: references/consumer-groups.md
Delivery semantics: references/delivery-semantics.md
Retries, DLQ, and replay: references/retries-dlq-and-replay.md
Storage, retention, and compaction: references/storage-retention-and-compaction.md
Broker and cluster operations: references/broker-and-cluster-operations.md
Observability: references/observability.md
Security and governance: references/security-and-governance.md
Capacity planning: references/capacity-planning.md
Multi-tenant Kafka: references/multi-tenant-kafka.md
Incident runbooks: references/incident-runbooks.md

---name: kafka-principal-engineerdescription: Principal/Senior-level Kafka playbook for topic design, consumer groups, delivery semantics, partitioning, retention, observability, and operating event-driven systems at scale. Use when: designing event streams, reviewing partition strategy, debugging lag/rebalance issues, or hardening Kafka in production.---# Kafka Mastery (Senior → Principal)## Operate- Confirm whether Kafka is solving event streaming, integration decoupling, replayability, or auditability.- Design topics, keys, and retention with business semantics and recovery strategy in mind.- Treat consumer lag, rebalance behavior, and schema evolution as first-class concerns.- Prefer explicit delivery semantics over magical “exactly once” assumptions.## Default Standards- Partition by stable business keys with clear ordering needs.- Consumers must be idempotent.- Retention and compaction are product decisions, not only infra settings.- Observe lag, throughput, error rate, rebalance churn, and ISR health.## References- Topic design and delivery semantics: [references/topic-design-and-delivery.md](references/topic-design-and-delivery.md)- Consumers and operations: [references/consumers-and-operations.md](references/consumers-and-operations.md)- Partitioning and ordering: [references/partitioning-and-ordering.md](references/partitioning-and-ordering.md)- Schema evolution: [references/schema-evolution.md](references/schema-evolution.md)- Producers: [references/producers.md](references/producers.md)- Consumer groups: [references/consumer-groups.md](references/consumer-groups.md)- Delivery semantics: [references/delivery-semantics.md](references/delivery-semantics.md)- Retries, DLQ, and replay: [references/retries-dlq-and-replay.md](references/retries-dlq-and-replay.md)- Storage, retention, and compaction: [references/storage-retention-and-compaction.md](references/storage-retention-and-compaction.md)- Broker and cluster operations: [references/broker-and-cluster-operations.md](references/broker-and-cluster-operations.md)- Observability: [references/observability.md](references/observability.md)- Security and governance: [references/security-and-governance.md](references/security-and-governance.md)- Capacity planning: [references/capacity-planning.md](references/capacity-planning.md)- Multi-tenant Kafka: [references/multi-tenant-kafka.md](references/multi-tenant-kafka.md)- Incident runbooks: [references/incident-runbooks.md](references/incident-runbooks.md)

Frequently asked questions