Kafka Connect in distributed mode uses Kafka itself to persist the offsets of any source connectors. This is a great way to do things as it means that you can easily add more workers, rebuild existing ones, etc without having to worry about where the state is persisted. I personally always recommend using distributed mode, even if just for a single worker instance - it just makes things easier, and more standard. Watch my talk online here to understand more about this. If you want to reset the offset of a source connector then you can do so by very carefully modifying the data in the Kafka topic itself.