Experience: 12+ years overall (8+ years for Senior Engineer level); 5+ years in event streaming
About the Role We are looking for a Senior Streaming Architect / Engineer to design, build, and run our enterprise real-time data platform on Confluent Cloud and Apache Flink. You will lead the move from legacy batch and ETL workloads to a cloud-native, event-driven architecture on AWS and GCP. You will set technical direction, mentor engineers, and work with business and executive stakeholders.
Key Responsibilities: • Architect multi-region, highly available Confluent Cloud environments with DR strategies (Cluster Linking, cross-region replication) supporting 200K+ events/sec. • Design and build real-time pipelines in Apache Flink (DataStream, Table, and SQL APIs): event-time processing, watermarks, late-event handling, windowed aggregations (tumbling, hopping, session), and stream joins. • Implement stateful, fault-tolerant processing with checkpointing, savepoints, and exactly-once semantics; tune parallelism, state backends, and operator chaining. • Build and manage Kafka Connect source/sink connectors (CDC, RDBMS, S3, analytics platforms) with SMTs and DLQ/retry patterns. • Own schema governance through Schema Registry (Avro/JSON/Protobuf) and compatibility rules. • Develop event-driven microservices and Kafka Streams / ksqlDB applications using Java and Spring Boot. • Lead migrations of on-prem middleware and Confluent Platform workloads to Confluent Cloud and AWS (EKS) with zero-downtime cutover. • Automate infrastructure with Terraform (Confluent, AWS, GCP providers) and GitOps CI/CD (Harness, Jenkins). • Implement secure connectivity (Private Service Connect, VPC, PrivateLink), RBAC, ACLs, SSL/SASL, and audit logging. • Set up observability (Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, Splunk); lead incident response, RCA, and performance tuning. • Optimize partitioning, retention, and capacity to reduce infrastructure cost. • Lead and mentor Kafka/Flink engineers, run training sessions, and communicate architecture trade-offs to leadership.
Required Qualifications • 12+ years in software, integration, or data engineering, with 5+ years hands-on with Apache Kafka / Confluent in production. • Strong hands-on experience with Apache Flink (DataStream API and Flink SQL), including state management and checkpoint tuning. • Deep Kafka knowledge: partitioning, replication/ISR, retention, compaction, Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, ksqlDB. • Experience running Confluent Cloud in an enterprise setting on AWS and/or GCP. • Advanced Java (11+) and Spring Boot; proficiency in Python and SQL. • Experience with Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes (EKS / GKE / OpenShift). • Experience with CI/CD tools (Jenkins, Harness) and monitoring stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk). • Proven cloud migration experience, from assessment and planning through cutover. • Strong communication skills and experience with stakeholders in regulated industries.
Preferred Qualifications • Confluent Certified Developer / Administrator for Apache Kafka; Confluent Certified Data Streaming Engineer (Flink). • AWS Solutions Architect certification. • Experience with Amazon MSK, Managed Service for Apache Flink, Kinesis, EMR, Glue, and MWAA. • PySpark experience for batch and streaming ETL. • Familiarity with Snowflake, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and DB2 as sources or sinks. • Experience with CDC patterns and legacy integration platforms (IBM MQ, IIB, mainframe). • Domain background in healthcare, insurance, banking/finance, or retail.
• Must-have: Confluent Kafka production experience and hands-on Apache Flink (not just Kafka Streams). • Ask about: Flink checkpointing/savepoints, watermarks and late events, exactly-once guarantees, Cluster Linking DR design. • Strong signal: Confluent Cloud migration from on-prem, Terraform-based provisioning, and Confluent certifications. • Profile titles to search: Kafka Architect, Confluent Architect, Streaming Data Engineer, Flink Engineer, Event Streaming Solution Architect.
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At SPECTRAFORCE, we are committed to maintaining a workplace that ensures fair compensation and wage transparency in adherence with all applicable state and local laws.This position's pay range is $55.00/hr - $58.00/hr.
