Can some please on this? https://github.com/apache/pinot/issues/8041

I am no expert in SSL but this seems like your connection to the kafka server is not even setup yet. (otherwise it should return some auth error i think) looking at the config

"stream.kafka.consumer.type": "LowLevel",
"stream.kafka.topic.name": "employee-data-feeds",
"stream.kafka.decoder.class.name": "org.apache.pinot.plugin.inputformat.avro.KafkaAvroMessageDecoder",
"stream.kafka.consumer.factory.class.name": "org.apache.pinot.plugin.stream.kafka20.KafkaConsumerFactory",
"stream.kafka.zk.broker.url": "localhost:2191/kafka",
"stream.kafka.broker.list": "localhost:19092",
"stream.kafka.hlc.zk.connect.string": "localhost:2191/kafka",
"stream.kafka.hlc.bootstrap.server": "<http://xx-xx-xx.com:443|xx-xx-xx.com:443>",

shouldn't you be using higher level consumer? you are already configuring hlc.zk.connect string to your :443 bootstrap server. i dunno if your lowerlevel bootstrap server localhost:2191 is actually running or now