Apache Kafka Developer

About the role

Bright Vision Technologies is seeking an experienced Apache Kafka Developer to join our remote team. This role offers a salary range of $100,000–$150,000 annually and is full-time, direct W2.

Responsibilities

• Architect, deploy, and operate large-scale Apache Kafka and Confluent platform environments.

• Design partitioning, replication, and topic strategies that balance throughput, durability, and operational simplicity.

• Implement strong security on Kafka clusters using SASL, mTLS, ACLs, RBAC, and integration with corporate IdPs.

• 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 HA/DR strategies for Kafka, 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 comprehensive observability using Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or Confluent Control Center.

• Drive Kafka cost and capacity optimization 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, applying disciplined engineering practices and partnering closely with stakeholders to ensure outcomes are durable, well-documented, and aligned with broader team and platform standards.

• Mentor and coach junior and mid-level engineers through code review, design review, pair programming, and structured knowledge sharing, helping the broader team grow in technical maturity and confidence over time.

• Maintain comprehensive, current technical documentation — including architecture diagrams, design decisions, configuration references, runbooks, and operational procedures — so that the system remains supportable, auditable, and easy to onboard new engineers onto over time.

• Continuously evaluate emerging streaming technologies (Pulsar, Redpanda, AWS MSK, Azure Event Hubs).

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 (partitions, replication, ISRs, consumer groups).

• Strong experience with Kafka security (SASL, mTLS, ACLs, RBAC).

• Hands-on experience with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and either Kafka Streams or ksqlDB.

• Experience with HA/DR strategies for Kafka.

• Strong scripting skills in Python, Bash, or Go.

• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible).

• Working knowledge of observability tooling for Kafka.

• Excellent troubleshooting, communication, and documentation skills.

Qualifications

• Confluent Certified Administrator or Developer credentials preferred.

• Experience operating Kafka on Kubernetes (Strimzi, Confluent Operator) preferred.

• Exposure to managed Kafka services (AWS MSK, Azure Event Hubs Kafka API) preferred.

• Familiarity with stream processing frameworks (Flink, Spark Streaming) preferred.

• Experience with data governance and lineage for streaming data preferred.