Kafka Engineer

Bright Vision Technologies•Piscataway Township, NJ

2d•$100,000 - $150,000•Remote

About The Position

Bright Vision Technologies is seeking an experienced Kafka Engineer to architect, deploy, and operate large-scale Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform environments for mission-critical event-driven workloads. The engineer will own the Kafka platform end to end, including cluster sizing, configuration, security, automation, observability, and developer enablement. The role combines deep Kafka internals expertise with DevOps and SRE practices and involves partnering with application teams to deliver a reliable, performant, developer-friendly streaming platform. The Kafka Engineer will collaborate with product, design, engineering, operations, and business stakeholders to turn ambiguous requirements into well-engineered solutions. The role also includes raising engineering standards through code and design reviews, mentoring junior engineers, and delivering production-ready work with clear communication and strong engineering discipline. This is a full-time, direct W2 position with Bright Vision Technologies, working remotely within the continental United States. It is part of the company's in-house, long-term, multi-year Statement of Work engagement; no third-party client, vendor, C2C, or 1099 arrangement is involved. No new H1B sponsorship is available, but qualified candidates needing an H1B transfer are welcome. A technical coding assessment is mandatory. Salary is $100,000–$150,000 per year, commensurate with experience, plus benefits.

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, including partitions, replication, ISRs, and consumer groups.
Strong experience with Kafka security, including SASL, mTLS, ACLs, and RBAC.
Hands-on experience with Kafka Connect and Schema Registry, and with either Kafka Streams or ksqlDB.
Experience with Kafka high-availability and disaster-recovery strategies.
Strong scripting skills in Python, Bash, or Go.
Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code, such as Terraform or Ansible.
Working knowledge of observability tooling for Kafka.
Excellent troubleshooting, communication, and documentation skills.
Willingness to work directly as a full-time W2 employee of Bright Vision Technologies.
Confidence in technical abilities and hands-on experience sufficient to complete a mandatory technical coding assessment.

Nice To Haves

Confluent Certified Administrator or Developer credentials.
Experience operating Kafka on Kubernetes using Strimzi or Confluent Operator.
Exposure to managed Kafka services such as AWS MSK or Azure Event Hubs Kafka API.
Familiarity with stream-processing frameworks such as Flink or 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-premises and cloud environments.
Design partitioning, replication, and topic strategies that balance throughput, durability, and operational simplicity.
Implement Kafka security using SASL, mTLS, ACLs, RBAC, and corporate identity-provider integrations.
Operate Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, KSQL/ksqlDB, and Kafka Streams in production.
Build and operate Kafka Connect pipelines integrating enterprise-system sources and sinks.
Design Kafka high-availability and disaster-recovery strategies, 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 Kafka observability using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or Confluent Control Center.
Optimize Kafka cost and capacity 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, documenting durable outcomes and aligning with team and platform standards.
Mentor and coach junior and mid-level engineers through code and design reviews, pair programming, and structured knowledge sharing.
Maintain current technical documentation, including architecture diagrams, design decisions, configuration references, runbooks, and operational procedures.
Evaluate emerging streaming technologies, including Pulsar, Redpanda, AWS MSK, and Azure Event Hubs.