Senior Data Streaming Engineer; Kafka & Flink

Job order - J - Permanent Full Time

CGI Federal is seeking a Sr Dev Sec Ops  Engineer (Data Streaming) to serve as a key member of an enterprise Center of Excellence (CoE) dedicated to mission critical, real time data streaming and secure software delivery. This role operates at a senior technical leadership level, guiding multiple application and platform teams in adopting best in class patterns for Kafka, Flink, CI/CD security, schema governance, microservices, and federal compliance.

This role serves as a technical force multiplier across the enterprise, elevating streaming engineering maturity through standardized patterns, shared libraries, and proactive enablement of mission development teams.

While some responsibilities include direct hands on engineering, the majority of the impact comes from defining enterprise patterns, establishing guardrails, reviewing designs, mentoring development teams, and providing deep troubleshooting expertise across the streaming ecosystem. A strong understanding of Kafka's operational behavior is essential—you will advise both developers and Kafka platform administrators, helping diagnose complex issues, design scalable solutions, and ensure reliable data flow across environments.

Collaborate closely with Platform Engineering and Dev Ops teams to ensure streaming application design aligns with enterprise platform capabilities, without directly operating infrastructure.

*** This position is located in Woodlawn, MD and requires individuals to be onsite 5 days/week***

• Define and maintain enterprise patterns, reference architectures, and guardrails for Kafka, Flink, Kafka Streams, CI/CD, schema governance, and secure microservice delivery.
• Develop shared streaming libraries, starter templates, and reference implementations to accelerate consistent adoption across mission teams.
• Provide strategic and hands on technical guidance to application teams evaluating streaming solution designs.
• Serve as a tier 3 escalation point for enterprise streaming issues, including consumer lag, serialization failures, state store anomalies, rebalancing behavior, and memory or performance bottlenecks.

• Partner with Dev Ops and Platform Engineering teams to define secure, opinionated CI/CD guardrails that enforce policy driven security, schema validation, and deployment standards.
• Architect reusable pipeline patterns incorporating automated vulnerability scanning, dependency governance, artifact promotion controls, and remediation workflows.
• Define patterns for zero downtime stateful deployments, including safe rolling updates, versioned schema evolution, and checkpoint/snapshot aligned cutovers.
• Integrate automated topic provisioning validation into pipeline guardrails, ensuring naming, configuration, and RBAC compliance.

• Develop secure coding and dependency management standards for Java/Kafka/Flink applications.
• Interpret vulnerability scan results, define remediation approaches, and coach teams through resolution.
• Maintain alignment with NIST controls, POAM lifecycle requirements, and federal patch management expectations.

• Apply deep knowledge of Kafka internals—brokers, partitions, replication, consumer groups, ACLs, RBAC, retention, and cluster health—to guide both developers and operators.
• Support operational debugging of ISR fluctuations, replication delays

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