Senior Kafka Engineer

Kforce has a client in Dallas, TX that is seeking a Senior Kafka Engineer. Summary We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Kafka Engineer to design, build, optimize, and support large-scale event-driven platforms leveraging Apache Kafka. This role will be responsible for architecting high-throughput, low-latency streaming solutions, ensuring reliable message delivery, optimizing platform performance, and enabling real-time data integration across enterprise systems. The ideal candidate has deep expertise in Kafka architecture, Java development, event streaming, and distributed systems. Key Responsibilities:

• Design and implement scalable, fault-tolerant event-driven architectures using Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform
• Lead Kafka topic and partition strategy design, ensuring optimal performance, scalability, and message ordering requirements
• Develop and maintain producer and consumer applications using Java
• Configure and manage consumer groups, offset management, partition assignments, and rebalancing strategies
• Design and implement robust retry, dead-letter queue (DLQ), replay, and error-handling frameworks
• Establish and enforce schema governance using Schema Registry, including Avro and Protobuf serialization standards
• Build and support enterprise event-routing and streaming data-plane solutions that facilitate reliable real-time data movement across systems
• Administer and secure Kafka environments through ACL management, authentication, and authorization controls
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize Kafka clusters, including performance tuning, throughput optimization, and consumer lag reduction
• Collaborate with application, infrastructure, and data engineering teams to define enterprise event streaming standards and best practices
• Support production environments, investigate incidents, and implement proactive monitoring and observability solutions
• 7+ years of software engineering experience with at least 4+ years focused on Apache Kafka
• Expert-level knowledge of Kafka architecture, including brokers, topics, partitions, replication, consumer groups, and message delivery semantics
• Hands-on experience with Confluent Platform (preferred)
• Strong experience designing and implementing event-driven and streaming architectures
• Advanced proficiency in Java development
• Experience with Schema Registry, Avro, and Protobuf
• Deep understanding of message ordering, partitioning strategies, replay mechanisms, and DLQ patterns
• Experience implementing and managing Kafka security, including ACLs, authentication, and authorization
• Strong troubleshooting and performance tuning skills, including consumer lag analysis and optimization
• Experience working with distributed systems in cloud or hybrid enterprise environments
• Strong understanding of high-availability and disaster recovery patterns for streaming platforms

• Confluent Certified Developer or Administrator certification
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
• Familiarity with Kafka Connect, ksqlDB, MirrorMaker, and stream processing frameworks
• Experience with observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or Datadog
• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, etc.)

• Apache Kafka
• Confluent Platform
• Java
• Schema Registry
• Avro/Protobuf
• Kafka ACLs
• Consumer Groups
• Topic & Partition Design
• DLQ/Retry/Replay Patterns
• Event-Driven Architecture
• Streaming Data Platforms
• Performance Tuning & Consumer Lag Optimization
• Distributed Systems
• Kubernetes/Cloud Platforms (preferred)