Sr. Confluent Kafka Engineer

Job Title: Sr. Confluent Kafka Engineer

Location: Baltimore, Maryland, 21235

Duration: Longterm Contract

Basic Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in a technical field.
• Software development experience with a solid understanding of building, deploying, and maintaining applications that leverage the Confluent Kafka platform, focusing on data streaming and messaging solutions.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Technology, or a related field.
• Master's or Doctorate degree may substitute for required experience.
• 5+ years of experience on an Agile development team
• Must be able to obtain and maintain a Public Trust. Contract requirement. 
• Must be able to work on-site in Woodlawn, MD 5 days a week. 

Required Skills

• Extensive experience with Apache Kafka and Confluent Kafka, including proficiency with Confluent Control Center, KSQLDB, Kafka Streams, and Kafka Connect.
• Proven experience in Kafka development, including producer and consumer API, stream processing, and connector development.
• Experience with Kafka cluster management, including setup, configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting.
• Familiarity with distributed systems, microservices architecture, and event-driven design patterns.
• Experience with AWS and containerization (Kubernetes) is a plus.
• Proficiency in programming languages, such as Java.
• Strong knowledge of Kafka internals, including brokers, zookeepers, topics, partitions, and offsets.
• Experience with monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana) and logging frameworks (e.g., Log4j.
• Proficiency in using Confluent Control Center for monitoring, managing, and optimizing Kafka clusters.
• Expertise in Kafka Streams for building scalable, fault-tolerant stream processing applications.
• Experience with KSQLDB for real-time processing and analytics on Kafka topics.
• Strong understanding of Kafka Connect for integrating Kafka with external data sources and sinks.
• Understanding of networking, security, and compliance aspects related to Kafka.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and automation tools (e.g., Jenkins, Git).
• Write and maintain high-quality code for Kafka producers, consumers, and stream processing applications.
• Develop and manage Kafka connectors for seamless integration with external systems, ensuring data consistency and reliability.
• Utilize Kafka Streams for real-time processing of streaming data, transforming and enriching data as it flows through the pipeline.
• Employ KSQLDB for stream processing tasks, including real-time analytics and transformations.
• Collaborate with data engineers, software developers, and DevOps teams to integrate Kafka solutions with existing systems.
• Ensure all Kafka-based solutions are scalable, secure, and optimized for performance.
• Troubleshoot and resolve issues related to Kafka performance, latency, and data integrity, including issues specific to Kafka Streams, KSQLDB, and Kafka Connect.

Desired Skills

• Experience in an AWS environment.
• Experience with Hadoop or other big data platform.
• Excellent troubleshooting and analytical skills to quickly identify and resolve issues. 
• Proficiency in Software development, preferably Java.
• Experience working on Agile projects and understanding Agile terminology.
• Participate in daily scrum and provide updates.