Kafka Architect

Job Title: Kafka Architect

Location: 100% Remote

Job Summary

We are seeking an experienced Kafka Architect to design, build, and optimize highly scalable, real-time data streaming platforms using Apache Kafka. The ideal candidate will define event-driven architectures, ensure reliability and performance, and guide engineering teams in best practices for streaming systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and architect enterprise-scale Kafka platforms for real-time data streaming and event-driven systems
• Define Kafka topic strategies, partitioning, replication, retention, and schema evolution
• Lead the implementation of high-availability, fault-tolerant Kafka clusters
• Establish best practices for Kafka security (SSL, SASL, ACLs, RBAC)
• Optimize Kafka performance, throughput, and latency
• Design data pipelines using Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, and/or ksqlDB
• Integrate Kafka with microservices, data lakes, warehouses, and analytics platforms
• Support hybrid or cloud-native Kafka deployments (AWS MSK, Confluent Cloud, Azure Event Hubs, etc.)
• Define monitoring, alerting, and observability strategies (Prometheus, Grafana, Confluent Control Center)
• Provide architectural guidance, reviews, and mentorship to development teams
• Collaborate with DevOps, SRE, and security teams on platform reliability
• Drive standards for schema management using Schema Registry (Avro/Protobuf/JSON)

Required Skills & Qualifications

• 10 years of experience in distributed systems, data platforms, or backend architecture
• 6 years of hands-on Apache Kafka architecture and production support
• Deep understanding of:
  • Kafka internals (brokers, ISR, leader election, consumer groups)
  • Exactly-once semantics, idempotent producers, transactions
  • Event-driven and streaming architectures
• Strong experience with Java, Scala, or Python
• Experience with Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, or ksqlDB
• Knowledge of microservices architecture and REST/gRPC APIs
• Strong Linux, networking, and JVM tuning skills
• Experience with CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Helm, Ansible)

Preferred / Nice-to-Have

• Experience with Confluent Platform / Confluent Cloud
• Cloud experience (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform)
• Kubernetes and containerized Kafka deployments
• Background in data engineering, real-time analytics, or big data ecosystems (Spark, Flink)
• Kafka or Confluent certifications

Thanks & Regards

Nishank Bhatt

1 (Ext-104)

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