Kafka Cloud Architect

Role: Kafka Cloud Architect

Location: Baltimore, MD

Duration: Long Term contract

Skills Requirements

Foundation for Success (Basic Qualifications)

• Bachelor s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or related field with 12 years of experience, OR Master s degree with 10 years of experience. Equivalent experience may be accepted in lieu of a degree.
• 12+ years of modern software development experience, including systems/application analysis and design.
• 7+ years of experience with Kafka (Apache or Confluent Kafka).
• 2+ years of experience in designing, architecting, and deploying to AWS.
• 1+ year of technical team leadership experience.
• Must be able to obtain and maintain a Public Trust security clearance.
• On-site requirement: Must be willing to work in Woodlawn, MD, 5 days a week.

Factors to Help You Shine (Required Skills)

• Hands-on production experience with Confluent Kafka including installation, capacity planning, admin, and platform management.
• Deep understanding of Kafka internals and architecture.
• Expertise in Kafka cluster/application security.
• Strong knowledge of Event-Driven Architecture (EDA).
• Experience in data pipelines, replication, and performance tuning.
• Kafka operations on OpenShift/Kubernetes, topic management, high availability, and SLA architectures.
• Strong understanding of microservice design principles, distributed systems, service integration patterns, security, and resiliency.
• Proficiency in Kafka Connect, KStreams, and KSQL with a focus on best-use practices.
• Experience scaling Kafka infrastructure components (Brokers, Connect, ZooKeeper, Schema Registry, Control Center).
• Ability to design, develop, and deploy new Kafka Connectors.
• Familiarity with data serialization formats (Avro, JSON) and compression techniques.
• Experience with AWS services: ECS, EKS, Flink, RDS (PostgreSQL), S3.
• Basic SQL knowledge and experience with PostgreSQL, DB2, Oracle, and ORM tools like JPA2, Hibernate, Spring JPA.