Senior Messaging & Cloud Integration Engineer

Job Title: Senior Messaging & Cloud Integration Engineer

Location: Remote, Chicago IL area preferred
Position: Contract, 6+ months with possible extension
Overview
TalentFish is casting a line for an Eventing / Messaging / Cloud-Native Integration Engineer to support our client's cloud modernization and acquisition-integration efforts. This senior-level consultant will assess asynchronous processing, messaging, streaming, serverless, and cloud-native managed-service dependencies that may materially affect application onboarding to a target cloud platform.

The engineer will analyze representative producers, consumers, queues, topics, streams, event triggers, retry behavior, dead-letter handling, ordering, replay, fanout, idempotency, and failure scenarios. This person will determine whether existing dependencies can be retained through a controlled exception, bridged to a target service, replaced with an equivalent architecture, or require deeper application refactoring.
What You Bring to the Role. (Ideal Experience)

• Senior-level experience with distributed systems, event-driven architecture, messaging platforms, and cloud-native integrations.
• Strong experience with technologies such as:
• Amazon SQS
• Amazon SNS
• Amazon Kinesis
• RabbitMQ
• Apache Kafka
• Amazon MSK
• AWS Lambda
• Lambda event source mappings
• Experience with HTTP-based integrations, asynchronous APIs, and event-driven integration patterns.
• Familiarity with serverless and bring-your-own-application deployment models.
• Deep knowledge of:
• At-most-once, at-least-once, and effectively-once delivery patterns
• Topic and partition design
• Routing and fanout
• Consumer groups
• Message ordering
• Deduplication
• Visibility timeouts
• Acknowledgment models
• Retries and backoff strategies
• Dead-letter queues
• Event replay
• Idempotency
• Schema evolution
• Backpressure
• Event-trigger behavior
• Strong understanding of operational observability for event-driven and asynchronous systems.
• Ability to identify differences between a straightforward technology substitution and a change to application behavior or processing semantics.
• Experience assessing platform, security, networking, deployment, and operational dependencies.
• Ability to estimate producer, consumer, application, platform, security, testing, and support effort for multiple migration approaches.
• Strong written communication skills with the ability to document complex architectural findings clearly and concisely.

What You'll Do. (Skills Used in this Position)

• Assess messaging, streaming, serverless, asynchronous processing, and managed-service dependencies.
• Analyze representative:
• Producers and consumers
• Queues and topics
• Streams and partitions
• Event triggers
• Retry mechanisms
• Dead-letter handling
• Ordering requirements
• Replay capabilities
• Routing and fanout patterns
• Failure behavior
• Evaluate message-delivery guarantees, acknowledgment behavior, visibility models, consumer-group behavior, and deduplication requirements.
• Assess idempotency, schema evolution, backpressure, event sequencing, and processing resilience.
• Determine whether current dependencies can be:
• Retained through a controlled exception
• Temporarily bridged
• Replaced with an equivalent target-platform service
• Redesigned using a different integration pattern
• Migrated only through application refactoring
• Identify differences in semantics between current and proposed technologies.
• Evaluate impacts to producers, consumers, platform services, security controls, deployment processes, and operational support.
• Assess observability, monitoring, alerting, tracing, and failure-recovery requirements.
• Perform bounded, non-production technical validation when needed.
• Identify platform backlog dependencies, sequencing constraints, migration risks, and operational considerations.
• Estimate the technical effort required for each migration path.
• Produce concise Engineering Assessment Inputs documenting:
• Semantic compatibility
• Architecture implications
• Application-refactoring requirements
• Migration sequencing
• Platform and security dependencies
• Operational risks
• Cutover and rollback considerations
• Likely future engineering effort
• Collaborate with application teams, integration architects, cloud platform owners, security teams, and operations stakeholders.

Compensation Information
This role requires authorization to work in the U.S. without current or future visa sponsorship. The expected hourly rate for this position is $55 - $62 per hour W2, depending on experience and qualifications. This role also qualifies for comprehensive benefits such as health insurance, 401(k), and paid time off. TalentFish is committed to pay transparency and equal opportunity. The salary range provided is in compliance with applicable state and federal regulations.
All offers are contingent upon the completion of a background check, which may include but is not limited to reference checks, education verification, employment verification, drug testing, criminal records checks, and any required certifications or compliance requirements based on the end client's background check policies and applicable laws.
TalentFish is an employee-owned company pioneering a new realm in talent acquisition. We are redefining IT staffing by evolving AI, video screening, and our unique platform. TalentFish focuses on providing the best employee, consultant, and client experience possible. At TalentFish we are an Equal Opportunity Employer; we embrace and encourage diversity.