Staff Software Engineer

Core Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate Kafka-based streaming services and stream-processing applications running 24x7 in multi-cloud production.
• Lead an end-to-end stream of the platform modernization initiative — sequence the cutover, prove equivalence, and partner with the consumer teams in the blast radius.
• Lead system architecture and evolve event governance, including topic conventions, access control, encryption posture, schema/contract evolution, and GitOps tooling.
• Author written design records for non-trivial decisions and contribute to architectural reviews.
• Improve DX for internal customers through client libraries, self-serve tooling, and onboarding automation that lets a new team start producing without filing a ticket.
• Guide engineers through complex implementation decisions, elevate code quality with rigorous reviews, and mentor team members with constructive feedback.
• Improve system reliability through observability and automation. Carry the on-call rotation for the full platform, diagnosing unfamiliar failure modes and authoring actionable runbooks.

Technology Stack

• Kotlin
• Java
• Spring Boot
• Apache Kafka
• Apache Flink
• AWS
• GCP
• Kubernetes
• Terraform
• TypeScript

On-Call Expectations

This is a platform engineering role. The on-call rotation covers the entire platform we operate today — including services, stream-processing apps, connectors, client libraries, and operational tooling that pre-date your joining. Candidates who are not comfortable reading code to diagnose unfamiliar failure modes, authoring runbooks, and being a first responder for production systems will not be a fit.

Minimum Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience: 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a proven track record of delivering production systems.
• Language Expertise: 5+ years of software engineering experience in a JVM language (Java or Kotlin).
• Distributed Systems: 3+ years of experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems or streaming systems in production.
• Kafka Mastery: Hands-on production experience with Apache Kafka — partitioning, consumer-group rebalances, idempotent producers, transactional writes, retention, and compaction.
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Experience with at least one major public cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform).
• Operations: Experience supporting 24x7 production systems on a rotating on-call schedule, including the triage of services you did not author.

Preferred Qualifications

• Education: Master's degree in a relevant discipline.
• Prior Impact: Prior impact as a Staff-level engineer driving cross-team technical change (written communication plans, partner-team office hours, deprecation enforcement).
• Stream Processing: Production experience with a stream-processing framework — Apache Flink, Kafka Streams, or comparable.
• Contract Design: Schema-based event-contract design in production — Avro, Protobuf, or JSON Schema — including backward and forward compatibility.
• Complex Migrations: Direct experience migrating production workloads at scale (broker change, datastore swap, encryption-stack change, network re-architecture), including cutover sequencing and rollback design.
• Managed Kafka: Operational experience with a managed Kafka offering — cluster sizing, private networking, ACL administration, schema-registry administration.
• Additional Tech: Experience with reactive programming on the JVM (Project Reactor, RxJava), working knowledge of Kubernetes and GitOps deployment patterns, and TypeScript/Node.js for serverless components.

Expected Technical Competencies

• Data Engineering & Systems Design: Designing and managing data infrastructure, pipelines, and processing systems to support scalable analytics and multi-cloud workloads.
• APIs & Integration: Designing and implementing APIs that enable seamless communication between systems and platforms.
• DevOps & CI/CD: Integrating development and operations to enable continuous delivery, utilizing containerization (Kubernetes) and test automation.
• Security Engineering: Incorporating security controls and safeguards into network postures and payload-level security models.
• Ledership & Soft Skills: Influences without authority across teams; drives consensus with pragmatic decision-making. Communicates complex ideas clearly and concisely. Balances short-term delivery and long-term technical health.