Senior Data Streaming Engineer

At 4A Consulting, we turn complexity into opportunity. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Baltimore, MD, we are a women-owned, boutique consulting firm specializing in delivering innovative, data-driven solutions to both the Federal Government and Fortune 500 clients. Our team blends deep industry knowledge with advanced technologies to design tailored strategies that drive measurable and sustainable outcomes. We pride ourselves on an agile, collaborative approach that helps organizations navigate challenges and seize emerging opportunities in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

At 4A, we don’t just deliver projects, we build trusted partnerships that empower our clients to lead with confidence in the digital age.

We are seeking a Senior Data Streaming Engineer with deep expertise in Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Java, Confluent technologies, and secure software delivery to support enterprise-scale real-time data streaming initiatives. The ideal candidate will provide both hands-on engineering expertise and technical leadership across application and platform teams, establishing standardized patterns for streaming architecture, Dev Sec Ops , schema governance, microservices, security, and operational reliability.

The successful candidate will serve as a senior technical resource responsible for developing reusable streaming solutions, advising development teams, troubleshooting complex production issues, and improving enterprise streaming engineering maturity through reference architectures, shared libraries, automation, and technical enablement.

This role is expected to be onsite 5 days a week.

Interview: In-person interview required

• Define and maintain enterprise patterns, reference architectures, standards, and guardrails for Kafka, Flink, Kafka Streams, CI/CD, schema governance, and secure microservices
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• Develop reusable streaming libraries, starter templates, reference implementations, and technical patterns to accelerate adoption across development teams.
• Provide hands-on technical guidance to application and platform teams evaluating streaming solution designs.
• Serve as a senior escalation point for complex streaming issues, including consumer lag, serialization failures, state store anomalies, rebalancing behavior, memory issues, and performance bottlenecks
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• Partner with Dev Ops and Platform Engineering teams to establish secure and standardized CI/CD and Dev Sec Ops practices.
• Design reusable pipeline patterns incorporating vulnerability scanning, dependency governance, artifact promotion controls, security validation, and remediation workflows.
• Define patterns for zero-downtime stateful deployments, including rolling updates, schema evolution, and checkpoint/snapshot-aligned deployments.
• Implement automated validation for Kafka topic provisioning, including naming standards, configurations, and RBAC compliance
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• Develop secure coding and dependency management standards for Java, Kafka, and Flink applications.
• Analyze vulnerability scan results, develop remediation approaches, and provide technical guidance to development teams.
• Support secure delivery practices aligned with NIST controls, POA&M processes, and enterprise security requirements
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• Apply advanced knowledge of Kafka internals, including brokers, partitions, replication, consumer groups, ACLs, RBAC, retention, and cluster health
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• Troubleshoot Kafka operational issues, including ISR fluctuations, replication delays, partitioning issues, and cluster health concerns
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• Design and implement secure microservices and Kafka client security configurations using SSL/MTLS and SASL/OAUTHBEARER
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• Develop enterprise documentation, standards, reference architectures, implementation guides, and reusable technical patterns.
• Mentor engineers and provide technical guidance to improve streaming development and operational practices.
• Support large-scale distributed streaming environments and participate in production incident troubleshooting and resolution.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field is preferred.
• 10+ years of progressive IT experience, including senior engineering, architecture, or technical advisory responsibilities.
• 5+ years of experience working with enterprise-scale data streaming or secure software delivery environments.
• Expert-level experience with Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Java, Avro, and Confluent Schema Registry
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• Strong hands‑on knowledge of Kafka…