Senior Confluent Kafka & Flink Streaming Architect

Job Description

Job Description

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.

Tools & Technologies:
Confluent Cloud, Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, ksqlDB, Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, AWS (EKS, MSK, S3, IAM, VPC), GCP (GKE, Pub/Sub, PSC), Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, Jenkins, Harness, Java / Spring Boot, Python, PySpark, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk.

" 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.