Sr. Open Source Software Engineer (Kafka)

Own Every Moment at Net App

At Net App, your ideas power innovation. We lead in intelligent data infrastructure—delivering unified storage, integrated data services, and solutions that help organizations unlock the full potential of their data, from AI to multicloud.

At Net App, your ideas power innovation. We lead in intelligent data infrastructure—delivering unified storage, integrated data services, and solutions that help organizations unlock the full potential of their data, from AI to multicloud. Ready to innovate and contribute to our path to $10B? Here, you'll collaborate with passionate teams, tackle real-world challenges, and see your impact in how customers transform and grow.

If you're ready to bring curiosity, creativity, and drive to every moment, Net App is where your journey begins. Join teams that innovate to elevate, drive results, and excel together across every function.

Are you an Apache Kafka committer who wants to operate at the highest level of technical and community influence? This role connects deep upstream work, including binding committer authority, KIP-level design, and protocol-aware engineering, directly to production-scale outcomes in enterprise Kafka deployments.

Net App Instaclustr runs one of the industry's largest managed open source data platform portfolios, including Apache Kafka services for enterprise customers across financial services, retail, and technology sectors. Our open source engineering team contributes to projects that matter to production operators at scale, and this role strengthens our ability to influence Apache Kafka upstream in areas that affect reliability, performance, operability, and customer delivery.

You will work at both levels – upstream influence and customer impact – with meaningful autonomy, strong peer collaboration, and direct access to the product and field relationships that turn technical work into commercial outcomes. This is a globally distributed team with up to 10% travel. The role is based in one of our office locations - US (San Jose, Raleigh, Boston, or Seattle), requires 3 days per week in office.

Note that we have global opportunities as well in Cork, Ireland & Netherlands (Schiphol). Postings also available in those markets/locations.

As a Senior Open Source Software Engineer, your responsibilities will include:

• Lead end-to-end upstream initiatives in Apache Kafka, from KIP authoring and design consensus through implementation, review, and release, in domains such as broker internals, storage and log management, replication, KRaft metadata quorum, consumer group coordination, Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, observability, and release quality.
• Provide binding committer reviews on upstream patches and community contributions, applying the technical rigor and authority that moves high-quality work through the Apache Kafka review process.
• Contribute to Apache Kafka release management as part of the committer community, including release planning, blocker triage, test stabilization, release candidate validation, documentation readiness, and post-release follow-through.
• Translate enterprise customer and operator needs into credible upstream proposals, KIP-level designs, and sustained technical engagement that only a committer can supply; advise product and field teams on complex Kafka trade-offs.
• Shape community direction through evidence-based participation relevant Kafka community channels; influence project decisions on architecture, compatibility, protocol evolution, release policy, contribution standards, and long-term roadmap.
• Mentor engineers toward committer standing and raise overall contribution quality through rigorous review practices, test discipline, and clear engineering guidance.
• Improve upstream infrastructure, including CI reliability, test coverage, contributor tooling, benchmarking, release automation, and compatibility validation, to reduce project-wide maintenance burden.

• A minimum of 12 years of applicable professional software engineering experience is required.
• Current Apache Kafka committer status with a sustained and publicly verifiable…