Senior Confluent Kafka Lead / Python Developer

Position Title: Senior Confluent Kafka Lead / Python Developer

Location: Onsite Columbus, OH or Nashville, TN

Duration: 6+ months

Job Description:

The Confluent Kafka Lead / Python Developer is responsible for designing, building, and operating enterprise-grade event streaming solutions using Confluent Kafka while developing Python-based producers, consumers, and streaming applications. This role blends deep hands on development with technical leadership, ensuring scalable, reliable, and secure real-time data flows across distributed systems.

The position plays a key role in event-driven architecture (EDA), data platform modernization, and real-time analytics initiatives.

Job location: Columbus, OH or Nashville, TN (both locations would be for on site work)

Required Qualifications:

Kafka & Streaming Experience

6 10+ years of experience in software or data engineering.

4+ years of hands-on experience with Apache Kafka and/or Confluent Platform.

Strong knowledge of: Kafka internals (brokers, partitions, offsets, consumer groups), Schema Registry and schema evolution, Kafka Connect architectures and connectors

Python Development

Strong proficiency in Python for backend and streaming development.

Experience building production-grade services using Python frameworks and libraries.

Familiarity with async processing, multithreading, or stream processing patterns is a plus.

Cloud & DevOps

Experience deploying Kafka and applications in cloud or hybrid environments (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform).

CI/CD pipeline experience (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab, Azure DevOps).

Infrastructure-as-Code experience (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM/Bicep).

Containerization experience (Docker, Kubernetes) preferred.

Preferred Qualifications:

Experience with ksqlDB, Kafka Streams, or stream processing frameworks (Flink, Spark Streaming).

Exposure to event sourcing or CQRS patterns.

Integration of Kafka with data lakes, warehouses, and analytics platforms.

Confluent or cloud platform certifications.

Experience supporting high-throughput, low-latency systems.

Soft Skills & Leadership:

Strong communication skills across engineering and stakeholder teams.

Ability to translate business use cases into event-driven technical solutions.

Comfortable acting as both hands-on developer and technical lead.

Experience influencing architecture and standards across teams.