Lead Data Engineer

  • Atlanta, GA
  • Posted 11 hours ago | Updated 11 hours ago

Overview

On Site
Depends on Experience
Accepts corp to corp applications
Contract - W2
Contract - 1 Month(s)

Skills

API
Access Control
Amazon Web Services
Apache Avro
Apache HTTP Server
Apache Kafka
Automated Testing

Job Details

We are looking for a Lead Data Engineer for our client in Atlanta, GA
Job Title: Lead Data Engineer Job Location: Atlanta, GA Job Type: Contract Job Description:

Responsibilities:

  • Own design & delivery of high throughput, low latency streaming solutions using technologies like Confluent Kafka, Apache Flink, Hazelcast, Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, and Schema Registry.
  • Design and implement microservices and event driven systems with robust ETL/ELT pipelines for real time ingestion, enrichment, and delivery.
  • Establish distributed caching and in memory data grid patterns (e.g., Redis, Hazelcast) to optimize read/write performance and session/state management.
  • Define and operationalize event gateways / event grids for event routing, fan out, and reliable delivery.
  • Lead data governance initiatives standards for metadata, lineage, classifications, retention, access controls, and compliance (PII/PCI/SOX/GDPR as applicable).
  • Drive CI/CD best practices (pipelines, automated testing, progressive delivery) to enable safe, frequent releases; champion DevSecOps and shift left testing.
  • Set SLOs/SLAs, track observability (tracing, metrics, logs), and optimize performance at scale (throughput, backpressure, state, checkpointing).
  • Work with Security, Platform, and Cloud teams on networking, IAM, secrets, certificates, and cost optimization.
  • Mentor engineers, conduct design reviews, and enforce coding standards and reliability patterns.
  • Guide platform and delivery roadmap
Required Qualifications:
  • 10+ years in software engineering; 5+ years designing large-scale real time or event driven platforms.
  • Expert with Confluent Kafka (brokers, partitions, consumer groups, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect), Flink (DataStream/Table API, stateful ops, checkpointing), Hazelcast, and/or Kafka Streams.
  • Strong in ETL/ELT design, streaming joins/windows, exactly once semantics, and idempotent processing.
  • Experience with microservices (Java/Python), REST/gRPC, protobuf/Avro, and contract-first development.
  • Hands-on with distributed caching and in memory data grids; performance tuning and eviction strategies.
  • Cloud experience in any one or more cloud platforms Azure/AWS/Google Cloud Platform; containers, Docker, Kubernetes.
  • Experience in production-grade CI/CD (Jenkins, Bamboo, Harness or similar), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Helm).
  • Robust observability (PrometheGrafana/OpenTelemetry, Splunk/ELK or similar), and resilience patterns (circuit breakers, retries, DLQs).
  • Practical data governance: metadata catalogs, lineage, encryption, RBAC.
  • Excellent communication; ability to lead design, influence stakeholders, and guide cross-functional delivery.
  • Core competencies to include Architectural Thinking, Systems Design, Operational Excellence, Security & Compliance, Team Leadership, Stakeholder Management.
  • Nice to Have:
  • Experience with CDC, Kafka Connect custom connectors, Flink SQL, Beam.
  • Streaming ML or feature stores integration (online/offline consistency).
  • Multi region / disaster recovery for streaming platforms.
  • Experience with Zero downtime migrations, blue/green, and canary deployments.
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