Java Core Engineer

Palo Alto, CA or Remote (Hybrid Optional)

Founded by the pioneers of Web Socket, Aklivity is redefining how enterprises manage real-time data. Our efforts center on the next-generation of API infrastructure that transforms operational data streams into real-time data products. Platform teams at organizations like Siemens, Kone and N Brown rely on Aklivity to deliver reliable, highly performant governed access to real-time data across teams, applications and systems.
We're a tight-knit, seasoned team of innovators and doers backed by leading investors including 468 Capital, Pear Ventures and Alumni Ventures.

We’re looking for a Java Core Engineer who thrives on low-level performance work, streaming systems, and protocol design. You’ll help shape the internals of Zilla—building lock-free, memory-efficient, zero-GC components that power our blazing-fast Kafka proxy.

• Design new features based on technical requirements of Apache Kafka centric event-driven architectures, aligning with protocol mobile and IoT client capabilities, such as REST, Web Sockets, HTTP/3, Graph
  
  QL, MQTT and AMQP.
• Anticipate Zilla runtime performance impact of design decisions, based on experience with different Java coding techniques such as flyweights vs object allocation and the corresponding latency introduced by garbage collection.
• Estimate implementation time based on experience with similar difficulty tasks to support delivery of project management milestones.
• Help map community enhancement requests to technical requirements by analyzing user needs and aligning with the high performance architecture of Aklivity Zilla project.

• A passion for working on deeply technical projects including distributed systems, concurrency & parallelism, application protocols, file systems & correctness.
• Solid understanding of the Java ecosystem (JVM, JRE, JDK).
• Solid understanding of web and network protocols and standards (HTTP, TLS, TCP/IP, DNS, etc).
• Solid understanding of messaging systems (Kafka, AMQP, MQTT, JMS)
• Excellent communication (verbal/written) and collaboration skills.

• Be part of a small, senior team building a product that’s reshaping real-time data infrastructure.
• Own core user-facing systems from the ground up.
• Work with customers who are deploying cutting-edge streaming architectures at global scale.
• Competitive salary, early equity, and benefits.
• Remote-first with flexible work culture.