Kafka Engineer
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 stakeholders to translate requirements into reliable, performant, developer-friendly streaming solutions. It also includes raising engineering standards through code and design reviews, mentoring, clear communication, and production-focused delivery. This is a full-time, direct W-2 position with Bright Vision Technologies, supporting the company’s in-house, long-term, multi-year Statement of Work engagement. It is 100% remote within the Continental United States. Third-party, C2C, and 1099 arrangements are not accepted. No new H-1B sponsorship is available; qualified candidates requiring an H-1B transfer may apply. 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, Schema Registry, and 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 tools such as Terraform or Ansible.
- Working knowledge of observability tooling for Kafka.
- Excellent troubleshooting, communication, and documentation skills.
- Must be willing to work directly as a full-time W-2 employee of Bright Vision Technologies; C2C, 1099, and third-party arrangements are not accepted.
- Must complete a mandatory technical coding assessment.
- No new H-1B sponsorship is available; qualified candidates currently on a valid H-1B visa who require a transfer are welcome to apply.
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 to balance throughput, durability, and operational simplicity.
- Implement Kafka security using SASL, mTLS, ACLs, RBAC, and integration with corporate identity providers.
- 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 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 by providing patterns, templates, and best practices.
- Lead incident response and post-incident reviews for streaming workloads, and work with stakeholders to ensure durable, documented outcomes aligned with team and platform standards.
- Mentor and coach junior and mid-level engineers through code and design reviews, pair programming, and knowledge sharing.
- Maintain 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.
Benefits
- Benefits are offered in addition to the competitive base salary; specific benefits are not listed.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
