Kafka Architect

Overview

Remote
Accepts corp to corp applications
Contract - W2
Contract - Independent
Contract - 14 day((s))

Skills

Python
Integration
Scala
KAFKA
ARCHITECTURE
Kafka Connect
Kafka Streams
Kafka security
ksqlDB

Job Details

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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