Only W2 - Kafka/Java Developer lead in Strongville, OH

Position Title: Software Engineer Lead - Contractor

Position Location: Strongsville, OH 44136 (or) Pittsburgh, PA 15222

Ability to work remote: 5 days onsite.

Acceptable time zone(s): EST

Days of the week: M-F 40 hours

Working Hours: M-F 8-5 EST

OT: Yes, possible

Travel: No

Potential for Contract Extension: Yes

**This position is contract with the right to hire if a need becomes available. Manager will only look at candidates that are open to converting to a full-time employee.

Function of the Group/Initiatives/Projects: We are part of a data platform in retail. DSPCOE Industry background: Finance/Banking a plus, open to other backgrounds

Team Dynamic: Business analysts and testing teams at least nine on team that will be joining, team in GCC offshore and interact with the different businesses.

Roles/Responsibilities:

• Multiple years of experience in software development with strong focus on Java / J2EE technologies.
• Proven experience in programming microservices-based applications, Kafka, Kstreams and Flink.
• Strong knowledge of Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Hibernate, REST APIs.
• Hands-on experience writing queries with Oracle and MSSQL Databases.
• Good understanding of containerization technologies like OCP, Docker, Kubernetes
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Git, Jenkins, and automated testing tools.
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to lead technical teams.
• Provides technical guidance and support to colleagues and solution development.

Preferred Skills:

• Certifications in Kafka, Java technologies.

Experience with event-driven architecture, messaging systems like Kafka or RabbitMQ.

• Exposure to SAFE Agile/Scrum methodologies

Understanding of Kafka architecture (brokers, partitions, topics, producers, consumers) (High level)

• Experience with Kafka Producers and Consumers using the Kafka Java client
• Knowledge of Kafka topic configurations (retention, replication, partitioning) (High level)
• Understanding of the Kafka Streams

Distributed Processing Concepts (Just a high level)

• Familiarity with event-driven architecture
• Knowledge of exactly-once processing vs at-least-once processing
• Understanding of stream-table duality (Kafka Streams vs. KTables)
• Schema Management
• Experience with Avro, Protobuf, or JSON for structured messages

Integration with External Systems

• Connecting Kafka Streams with databases (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra)
• Using Kafka Connect for external data integration
• Knowledge of REST APIs and how to expose data from Kafka Streams

DevOps and Deployment*

• Familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes for containerized deployment
• Using CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI)
• Logging and tracing using ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) or OpenTelemetry (High level understanding)

Testing Kafka Streams Applications

• Writing unit tests with Mockito and JUnit
• Using TestContainers for integration testing with Kafka
• Validating Kafka Streams topologies using TopologyTestDriver

API developers:

• Experience building REST APIs using Spring Boot
• Experience with Spring Data/Spring Data JPA for connecting to and reading from databases via APIs
• Experience writing unit tests using JUnit/Spock
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins
• Familiarity with SQL/NoSQL databases

Nice-to-have Skills:

• Monitoring and Optimization
• Understanding of Kafka Streams metrics (through JMX, Grafana, Prometheus)
• Profiling performance and tuning configurations (buffer sizes, commit intervals)
• Handling out-of-order events and rebalancing issues
• Knowledge of Apache Flink or KSQLDB for alternative stream processing
• Knowledge of Docker, OpenShift
• Experience with tools like Dynatrace for troubleshooting

MUST HAVE SKILLS:

• Kafka Expert level (see roles/responsibilities for in depth skill description)
• Java / J2EE technologies Expert Level
• Apache basics
• Strong knowledge of Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Hibernate, REST APIs.
• Experience building REST APIs using Spring Boot
• Experience with Spring Data/Spring Data JPA for connecting to and reading from databases via APIs
• Experience writing unit tests using JUnit/Spock
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins
• Familiarity with SQL/NoSQL databases

FLEX SKILLS:

• Knowledge of REST APIs
• DevOps and Deployment
• Familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes for containerized deployment
• Using CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI)
• Knowledge of Apache Flink or KSQLDB for alternative stream processing
• Knowledge of Docker, OpenShift

Soft Skills:

• Problem Solving Skills
• Ability to lead, mentor

Education:

• Bachelor s or relevant experience will be considered

Role Differentiator:

• Growth, Opportunity, modern technologies

Interview Process:

• 1st with manager, initial screen ~30 minutes
• 2nd round with technical team (panel) ~45-1 hour
• Possibility to 3rd round if needing further assessment

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Renu

Technical Recruiter, AGM TECH SOLUTIONS

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