Full-Time Kafka Engineer

• Design, develop, and deploy high-performance Kafka producers, consumers, and stream processing applications (using Kafka Streams, ksqlDB, Flink, or Spark Streaming) in Java.
• Collaborate with architects and other engineering teams to define and evolve our event-driven architecture, ensuring best practices for Kafka topic design, partitioning, replication, and data retention.
• Implement and manage components of the Kafka ecosystem, including Kafka Connect (source and sink connectors), Schema Registry (Avro, Protobuf), and Kafka security features.
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize Kafka clusters and Kafka-dependent applications for throughput, latency, reliability, and resource utilization.
• Build and maintain robust and resilient data pipelines for real-time ingestion, transformation, and distribution of data across various systems.
• Provide operational support for Kafka-based systems, including incident response, root cause analysis, and proactive maintenance to ensure high availability and reliability.
• Enforce data contract definitions and schema evolution strategies using Schema Registry to maintain data quality and compatibility across services.
• Implement comprehensive testing strategies for Kafka applications, including unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, ensuring data integrity and system reliability.
• Create and maintain detailed technical documentation, architectural diagrams, and operational runbooks for Kafka-related components and processes.
• Act as a subject matter expert, sharing knowledge, mentoring junior engineers, and championing Kafka best practices across the organization.

• US Citizenship Required in order to obtain Public Trust.
• Active DHS Public Trust preferred.
• Bachelor Degree + 7 years of experience.
• Extensive hands-on experience designing, developing, and deploying applications using Apache Kafka (producers, consumers, topic management, consumer groups).
• Deep understanding of Kafka's internal architecture, guarantees (at-least-once, exactly-once), offset management, and delivery semantics.
• Experience with Kafka Streams API or other stream processing frameworks (e.g., Flink, Spark Streaming with Kafka).
• Programming Proficiency: High-level proficiency in at least one modern backend programming language suitable for Kafka development (Java strongly preferred).
• Strong understanding of distributed systems principles, concurrency, fault tolerance, and resilience patterns.
• Experience with data serialization formats such as Avro, Protobuf, or JSON Schema, and their use with Kafka Schema Registry.
• Solid understanding of relational and/or NoSQL databases, and experience integrating them with Kafka.
• Excellent analytical, debugging, and problem-solving skills in complex distributed environments.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• Knowledge of monitoring and observability tools for Kafka and streaming applications (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, Datadog).
• Working knowledge of Git and collaborative development workflows.
• Understanding of all elements of the software development life cycle, including planning, development, requirements management, CM, quality assurance, and release management.

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