**Public trust clearance Mandatory**

Location: Woodlawn, MD (Onsite – 5 Days/Week)
Duration: Long Term Contract
Experience: 10+ Years

Job Overview

We are seeking an experienced Confluent Kafka Engineer with strong expertise in Kafka architecture, development, and production support. The ideal candidate will design and manage Kafka cluster environments, build scalable streaming applications, and ensure high availability and reliability of data pipelines.

The role requires hands-on experience with Confluent Control Center, Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, and KSQLDB, along with strong programming skills in Java or Python.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and manage Confluent Kafka cluster environments

• Configure, monitor, and troubleshoot Kafka instances and clusters

• Develop Kafka producers, consumers, and streaming applications

• Build and maintain real-time data pipelines and messaging solutions

• Implement Kafka Streams and KSQLDB for real-time analytics

• Develop and manage Kafka Connectors for integrating external systems

• Monitor Kafka clusters using Confluent Control Center and monitoring tools

• Ensure data integrity, reliability, and performance optimization

• Collaborate with data engineers, DevOps teams, and product teams

• Participate in Agile ceremonies and sprint activities

• Troubleshoot Kafka performance, latency, and messaging issues

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field

• 10+ years of experience in software development or data engineering

• 5+ years of experience in Agile development environments

• Ability to obtain and maintain Public Trust clearance

• Must be able to work onsite in Woodlawn, MD (5 days/week)

Required Technical Skills

• Apache Kafka & Confluent Kafka

• Confluent Control Center

• Kafka Streams

• Kafka Connect

• KSQLDB

• Kafka cluster setup, configuration, and monitoring

• Kafka producers and consumers development

• Event-driven architecture & microservices

• Programming languages: Java or Python

• Kafka internals (brokers, topics, partitions, offsets, zookeeper)

• Monitoring tools: Prometheus, Grafana

• Logging frameworks: Log4j

• Containerization: Kubernetes

• CI/CD tools: Jenkins, Git

• Distributed systems architecture

• Networking and Kafka security best practices

Preferred / Desired Skills

• Experience working in AWS cloud environments

• Experience with Hadoop or Big Data platforms

• Strong troubleshooting and analytical skills

• Knowledge of DevOps practices and automation

• Experience working in Agile development teams

• Experience building real-time streaming data pipelines

Nice to Have

• Experience with large-scale distributed data systems

• Familiarity with enterprise event streaming architecture

• Experience integrating Kafka with enterprise data platforms