Senior Kafka Developer - NBA

Humana • Louisville, KY

2d • $106,900 - $147,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Kafka Developer builds and operates the event streaming that connects Team Caliber — the NBA platform's business rules engine, built in Java and Drools — to the rest of the decisioning system. You design and own the Kafka topics, producers, and consumers that move eligibility, suppression, and decisioning events through the platform reliably and in order. This is a hands-on backend role for an engineer who is fluent in event-driven design and enjoys making high-throughput, fault-tolerant streaming systems work correctly under real production load.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related degree
• 5+ years of backend software engineering, with hands-on production experience building on Apache Kafka/Confluent.
• Strong Java skills and experience designing event-driven services.
• Deep understanding of Kafka internals: partitioning, consumer groups, offsets, ordering, and delivery semantics.
• Solid grasp of distributed-systems fundamentals — idempotency, retries, backpressure, and failure handling in asynchronous systems.
• Experience operating services on cloud infrastructure (Azure or equivalent) with containers/Kubernetes and CI/CD.
• Clear communicator who can define and defend an event contract with partner teams.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with the Drools rules engine or another business rules management system.
• Familiarity with Kafka Streams, schema registry, and Avro/Protobuf.
• Experience with stream processing patterns and real-time data pipelines.
• Background in healthcare, insurance, or another regulated industry with PHI handling requirements.

Responsibilities

• Event streaming — Design, build, and own Kafka producers, consumers, and topic strategy that carry rules-engine inputs and outputs across the platform.
• Rules engine integration — Integrate the Java/Drools rules engine with upstream and downstream systems through well-designed event and API contracts.
• Reliability — Engineer for correctness under load: partitioning, ordering, idempotency, exactly-once or effectively-once semantics, retries, and dead-letter handling.
• Backend services — Build and maintain the Java services around the rules engine that produce and consume events and expose APIs.
• Performance and scale — Profile and tune streaming throughput and latency; ensure the pipeline scales as event volume grows.
• Observability — Instrument streams and services with logging, metrics, and alerting so issues are caught early and diagnosed quickly.
• Quality — Write tests, participate in code reviews, and uphold engineering standards; the platform handles member PHI, so security and compliance hygiene are essential.

Benefits

• medical
• dental
• vision benefits
• 401(k) retirement savings plan
• time off (including paid time off, company and personal holidays, paid parental and caregiver leave)
• short-term and long-term disability
• life insurance

What This Job Offers

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