Kafka Engineer

Bright Vision Technologies•Jersey City, NJ

1d•$100,000 - $150,000•Remote

About The Position

We are seeking an experienced Kafka Engineer to architect, deploy, and operate large-scale Apache Kafka and Confluent platform environments supporting mission-critical event-driven workloads. In this role you will own the Kafka platform end-to-end, including cluster sizing, configuration, security, automation, observability, and developer enablement. The ideal candidate will combine deep Kafka internals knowledge with strong DevOps and SRE practices, and will partner with application teams to deliver a reliable, performant, and developer-friendly streaming platform. In this role you will work closely with cross-functional partners — product, design, engineering, operations, and business stakeholders — to translate ambiguous requirements into well-engineered solutions, and will be expected to raise the bar through code review, design review, and mentorship of more junior engineers. The successful candidate brings strong engineering discipline, a clear communication style, and a track record of shipping meaningful work that holds up well in production.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
Five or more years of experience operating Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform in production.
Deep, hands-on knowledge of Kafka internals (partitions, replication, ISRs, consumer groups).
Strong experience with Kafka security (SASL, mTLS, ACLs, RBAC).
Hands-on experience with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and either Kafka Streams or ksqlDB.
Experience with HA/DR strategies for Kafka.
Strong scripting skills in Python, Bash, or Go.
Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible).
Working knowledge of observability tooling for Kafka.
Excellent troubleshooting, communication, and documentation skills.

Nice To Haves

Confluent Certified Administrator or Developer credentials.
Experience operating Kafka on Kubernetes (Strimzi, Confluent Operator).
Exposure to managed Kafka services (AWS MSK, Azure Event Hubs Kafka API).
Familiarity with stream processing frameworks (Flink, Spark Streaming).
Experience with data governance and lineage for streaming data.

Responsibilities

Architect, deploy, and operate large-scale Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform clusters across on-prem and cloud environments.
Design partitioning, replication, and topic strategies that balance throughput, durability, and operational simplicity.
Implement strong security on Kafka clusters using SASL, mTLS, ACLs, RBAC, and integration with corporate IdPs.
Operate Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, KSQL/ksqlDB, and Kafka Streams in production.
Build and operate Kafka Connect pipelines integrating sources and sinks across enterprise systems.
Design HA/DR strategies for Kafka, including MirrorMaker 2, Cluster Linking, and multi-region active-active patterns.
Build CI/CD pipelines for Kafka topic, ACL, and connector configurations using GitOps patterns.
Implement comprehensive observability using Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or Confluent Control Center.
Drive Kafka cost and capacity optimization through right-sizing and storage tiering.
Onboard application teams to Kafka with clear patterns, templates, and best practices.
Lead incident response and post-incident reviews for streaming workloads, applying disciplined engineering practices and partnering closely with stakeholders to ensure outcomes are durable, well-documented, and aligned with broader team and platform standards.
Mentor and coach junior and mid-level engineers through code review, design review, pair programming, and structured knowledge sharing, helping the broader team grow in technical maturity and confidence over time.
Maintain comprehensive, current technical documentation — including architecture diagrams, design decisions, configuration references, runbooks, and operational procedures — so that the system remains supportable, auditable, and easy to onboard new engineers onto over time.
Continuously evaluate emerging streaming technologies (Pulsar, Redpanda, AWS MSK, Azure Event Hubs).