Kafka Engineer

The Opportunity

CA, CA seeking a Kafka Engineer to support the Border Enforcement Applications for Government Leading‑Edge Information Technology (BEAGLE) contract. You will apply your knowledge, skills and experience to building a modern, cloud‑native application. If you thrive in a culture of innovation and bring creative ideas to solve complex problems at the team and portfolio levels, this opportunity is for you.

• Serve as an Agile Scrum team member providing software development support and maintenance for the delivery of releasable software in short sprint cycles. Collaborate closely with developers, stakeholders, and end users within Agile processes.
• Design, develop, and deploy high‑performance Kafka producers, consumers, and stream processing applications (using Kafka Streams, ksql
  
  DB, Flink, or Spark Streaming) in Java.
• Collaborate with architects and engineering teams to define and evolve our event‑driven architecture, ensuring best practices for Kafka topic design, partitioning, replication, and data retention.
• Implement and manage components of the Kafka ecosystem, including Kafka Connect, Schema Registry (Avro, Protobuf), and Kafka security features.
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize Kafka clusters and Kafka‑dependent applications for throughput, latency, reliability, and resource utilization.
• Build and maintain robust and resilient data pipelines for real‑time ingestion, transformation, and distribution of data across various systems.
• Provide operational support for Kafka‑based systems, including incident response, root cause analysis, and proactive maintenance to ensure high availability and reliability.
• Enforce data contract definitions and schema evolution strategies using Schema Registry to maintain data quality and compatibility across services.
• Implement comprehensive testing strategies for Kafka applications, including unit, integration, and end‑to‑end tests, ensuring data integrity and system reliability.
• Create and maintain detailed technical documentation, architectural diagrams, and operational runbooks for Kafka‑related components and processes.
• Act as a subject matter expert, sharing knowledge, mentoring junior engineers, and championing Kafka best practices across the organization.

liU.S. Citizen with the ability to pass CBP background investigation.
• Extensive hands‑on experience designing, developing, and deploying applications using Apache Kafka (producers, consumers, topic management, consumer groups).
• Deep understanding of Kafka’s internal architecture, guarantees, offset management, and delivery semantics.
• Experience with Kafka Streams API or other stream processing frameworks (e.g., Flink, Spark Streaming with Kafka).
• High‑level proficiency in Java (strongly preferred) or another modern backend language suitable for Kafka development.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems principles, concurrency, fault tolerance, and resilience patterns.
• Experience with data serialization formats such as Avro, Protobuf, or JSON Schema, and their use with Kafka Schema Registry.
• Solid understanding of relational and/or No
  
  SQL databases, and experience integrating them with Kafka.
• Excellent analytical, debugging, and problem‑solving skills in complex distributed environments.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• Knowledge of monitoring and observability tools for Kafka and streaming applications (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, Datadog).
• Working knowledge of Git and collaborative development workflows.
• Understanding of all elements of the software development life cycle, including planning, development, requirements management, configuration management, quality assurance, and release management.
• Professional experience: at least seven (7) years related technical experience in software design, development, and implementation in a Windows environment.
• College degree (B.S.) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Management Systems, or a related discipline.
• Equivalent professional experience considered in lieu of degree.
• Local candidates must be…