[ecshafer]

My initial reaction reading this is that you really screwed up somewhere with your infrastructure. A pretty large company needs a Kafka team, a smaller company needs their infrastructure team to have a decent understanding with maybe one person / consultant with deeper knowledge.

Kafka for 99% of developers in the company should be "Can I use our internal library to read/write some topic".

[stcroixx]

My preferred size of company would not have the resources for a team dedicated to infrastructure. In companies this size, there would be multiple developers skilled enough with the tech to support it fully from installation, configuration, optimization, backup, DR, upgrades, troubleshooting, designing and implementing solutions, etc. Everything. I've worked at several companies of this size and much prefer the broader scope of responsibility and experience to what you get somewhere like you described.