Kafka Platform Engineer
Bright Vision Technologies is a technology consulting and software development company delivering cloud, AI, data, and enterprise solutions across the United States. This is a fantastic opportunity to join an established and well-respected organization offering tremendous career growth potential.
Job Title: Kafka Platform Engineer
L ocation: 100% Remote (U.S.)
Position Type: Full-time, Direct W2
Salary Range: $130,000–$180,000 Annually (based on experience)
Experience Required: 10+ Years
Sponsorship: U.S. Citizens, Green Card Holders, EAD Holders, and H-1B transfer candidates are encouraged to apply. We are unable to sponsor new H-1B visa petitions for this position.
Job Summary
Bright Vision Technologies is seeking a highly experienced Kafka Platform Engineer with 10+ years of experience in distributed systems, event streaming, and platform engineering, including extensive expertise with Apache Kafka and the Confluent Platform . The ideal candidate will architect, deploy, and manage enterprise-scale streaming platforms that power mission-critical, real-time data processing across the organization. This role requires deep technical expertise in Kafka internals, platform automation, security, observability, and cloud-native infrastructure, along with the ability to mentor engineering teams and define enterprise event-streaming standards.
Key Responsibilities
- Architect, deploy, and manage highly available Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform environments supporting enterprise-scale event-driven applications.
- Design Kafka cluster topology, broker configuration, partitioning strategies, replication, capacity planning, and performance optimization for high-throughput workloads.
- Implement enterprise-grade security using SASL, SSL/mTLS, ACLs, RBAC , encryption, and authentication mechanisms.
- Design and manage Kafka Connect , Schema Registry , Kafka Streams , ksqlDB , and event streaming pipelines for real-time data integration.
- Develop and maintain Infrastructure as Code using Terraform , Ansible , or similar automation frameworks to provision and manage Kafka infrastructure.
- Design and implement High Availability (HA), Disaster Recovery (DR), backup, failover, and cross-region replication strategies.
- Build comprehensive monitoring, alerting, logging, and observability solutions using Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK , and Confluent monitoring tools.
- Optimize cluster performance, troubleshoot production issues, conduct root cause analysis, and implement long-term platform improvements.
- Support Kafka deployments on Kubernetes using Strimzi , Confluent Operator , or managed cloud services including AWS MSK , Azure Event Hubs (Kafka API) , and Confluent Cloud .
- Collaborate with application developers, data engineers, DevOps, SRE, and enterprise architects to establish event-driven architecture standards and best practices.
- Conduct architecture reviews, establish platform governance, perform code reviews, and mentor engineers on Kafka development and operations.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical discipline.
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10+ years of professional experience in distributed systems, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering, including 5+ years of hands-on Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform experience .
- Expert-level knowledge of Kafka internals , including partitions, replication, brokers, ISR, consumer groups, offset management, and performance tuning.
- Extensive experience implementing Kafka security using SASL, SSL/mTLS, ACLs, RBAC , and enterprise authentication mechanisms.
- Strong hands-on experience with Kafka Connect , Schema Registry , Kafka Streams , ksqlDB , and real-time event streaming architectures.
- Experience implementing High Availability (HA) , Disaster Recovery (DR) , multi-cluster replication, and cross-region failover strategies.
- Advanced scripting ski