Kafka Platform Engineer
About The Position
Bright Vision Technologies is seeking a highly experienced Kafka Platform Engineer to architect, deploy, and manage enterprise-scale streaming platforms for mission-critical, real-time data processing. The role calls for deep expertise in distributed systems, Apache Kafka and the Confluent Platform, platform automation, security, observability, and cloud-native infrastructure. The engineer will help define enterprise event-streaming standards and mentor engineering teams. The position is 100% remote in the U.S., full-time, and direct W2. The stated annual salary range is $130,000–$180,000, based on experience. Bright Vision Technologies is unable to sponsor new H-1B visa petitions; U.S. citizens, Green Card holders, EAD holders, and candidates transferring an H-1B are encouraged to apply.
Requirements
- Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical discipline.
- 10+ years of professional experience in distributed systems, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering, including 5+ years of hands-on Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform experience.
- Expert-level knowledge of Kafka internals, including partitions, replication, brokers, ISR, consumer groups, offset management, and performance tuning.
- Extensive experience implementing Kafka security using SASL, SSL/mTLS, ACLs, RBAC, and enterprise authentication mechanisms.
- Strong hands-on experience with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Kafka Streams, ksqlDB, and real-time event-streaming architectures.
- Experience implementing high availability, disaster recovery, multi-cluster replication, and cross-region failover strategies.
- Advanced scripting skills using Python, Bash, or Go, and infrastructure as code experience using Terraform, Ansible, or similar tools.
- Strong experience with observability platforms including Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK, and distributed tracing solutions.
- Excellent troubleshooting, communication, documentation, stakeholder management, and technical leadership skills.
Nice To Haves
- Confluent Certified Administrator or Confluent Certified Developer certification.
- Experience operating Kafka on Kubernetes using Strimzi, Confluent Operator, or similar operators.
- Hands-on experience with managed Kafka services including AWS MSK, Confluent Cloud, Azure Event Hubs (Kafka API), or Google Cloud Managed Kafka.
- Experience with stream processing technologies such as Apache Flink, Apache Spark Structured Streaming, or Apache Beam.
- Knowledge of data governance, schema evolution, metadata management, and data lineage for streaming platforms.
Responsibilities
- Architect, deploy, and manage highly available Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform environments for enterprise-scale event-driven applications.
- Design Kafka cluster topology, broker configuration, partitioning, replication, capacity planning, and performance optimization for high-throughput workloads.
- Implement enterprise-grade security using SASL, SSL/mTLS, ACLs, RBAC, encryption, and authentication mechanisms.
- Design and manage Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Kafka Streams, ksqlDB, and real-time event-streaming pipelines.
- Develop and maintain infrastructure as code using Terraform, Ansible, or similar automation frameworks.
- Design and implement high availability, disaster recovery, backup, failover, and cross-region replication strategies.
- Build monitoring, alerting, logging, and observability solutions using Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK, and Confluent monitoring tools.
- Optimize cluster performance, troubleshoot production issues, conduct root cause analysis, and implement long-term platform improvements.
- Support Kafka deployments on Kubernetes using Strimzi, Confluent Operator, or managed cloud services including AWS MSK, Azure Event Hubs (Kafka API), and Confluent Cloud.
- Collaborate with application developers, data engineers, DevOps, SRE, and enterprise architects to establish event-driven architecture standards and best practices.
- Conduct architecture reviews, establish platform governance, perform code reviews, and mentor engineers on Kafka development and operations.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
