Kafka Engineer

Bright Vision Technologies • Aurora, IL

1d • $82,000 - $100,000 • 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 supporting 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 partners with application teams and cross-functional product, design, engineering, operations, and business stakeholders to translate ambiguous requirements into reliable, performant, developer-friendly streaming solutions. The successful candidate brings deep Kafka internals knowledge and strong DevOps and SRE practices, communicates clearly, ships production-ready work, and contributes through code and design reviews and mentorship of more junior engineers.

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, Schema Registry, and either Kafka Streams or ksqlDB.
• Experience with high-availability and disaster-recovery strategies for Kafka.
• Strong scripting skills in Python, Bash, or Go.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or 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, including 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 and Confluent Platform environments for mission-critical event-driven workloads.
• Own the Kafka platform end-to-end, including cluster sizing, configuration, security, automation, observability, and developer enablement.
• Partner with application teams to deliver a reliable, performant, and developer-friendly streaming platform.
• Work with product, design, engineering, operations, and business stakeholders to translate ambiguous requirements into well-engineered solutions.
• Conduct code reviews and design reviews, and mentor more junior engineers.
• Troubleshoot Kafka platform issues and maintain strong documentation.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior