Kafka Architect/Kafka Solution Architect

Job Title: Kafka Solution Architect

Location: Phoenix, AZ Hybrid (3 Days/Week Office)

Duration: Long term

Tax Term:- W2

We are seeking an experienced Kafka Solution Architect with 12+ years of IT experience and deep expertise in designing, implementing, and scaling real-time event-driven architectures using Apache Kafka. The ideal candidate will drive architecture decisions, ensure high availability and performance, and lead enterprise-level streaming solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and architect scalable, high-throughput Kafka-based streaming solutions
• Define event-driven architecture patterns and best practices
• Lead Kafka cluster setup, configuration, optimization, and performance tuning
• Implement Kafka security (SSL, SASL, ACLs, RBAC)
• Design data streaming pipelines using Kafka Streams, KSQL, Kafka Connect
• Integrate Kafka with cloud platforms (AWS / Azure / Google Cloud Platform)
• Ensure high availability, disaster recovery, and monitoring strategies
• Work with DevOps for CI/CD automation and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Provide technical leadership and mentor development teams
• Collaborate with stakeholders to translate business requirements into architecture solutions

Required Skills

• 12+ years of overall IT experience
• 7+ years of hands-on Apache Kafka architecture experience
• Strong expertise in distributed systems and event-driven architecture
• Experience with Confluent Platform
• Strong knowledge of schema registry, serialization (Avro/Protobuf/JSON)
• Experience with microservices architecture
• Strong knowledge of Java / Scala (preferred)
• Experience with monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Splunk)
• Cloud experience (AWS MSK / Azure Event Hubs / Google Cloud Platform Pub/Sub)

Nice to Have

• Kafka certifications (Confluent Certified Developer/Administrator)
• Experience in financial services / retail / telecom domains
• Experience with streaming frameworks (Flink / Spark Streaming)