Senior Kafka Developer - NBA

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The Senior Kafka Developer builds and operates the event streaming that connects Team Caliber — the NBA platform's business rules engine, built in Java and Drools — to the rest of the decisioning system. You design and own the Kafka topics, producers, and consumers that move eligibility, suppression, and decisioning events through the platform reliably and in order. This is a hands-on backend role for an engineer who is fluent in event-driven design and enjoys making high-throughput, fault-tolerant streaming systems work correctly under real production load. Key Responsibilities

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Event streaming — Design, build, and own Kafka producers, consumers, and topic strategy that carry rules-engine inputs and outputs across the platform.

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Rules engine integration — Integrate the Java/Drools rules engine with upstream and downstream systems through well-designed event and API contracts.

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Reliability — Engineer for correctness under load: partitioning, ordering, idempotency, exactly-once or effectively-once semantics, retries, and dead-letter handling.

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Backend services — Build and maintain the Java services around the rules engine that produce and consume events and expose APIs.

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Performance and scale — Profile and tune streaming throughput and latency; ensure the pipeline scales as event volume grows.

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Observability — Instrument streams and services with logging, metrics, and alerting so issues are caught early and diagnosed quickly.

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Quality — Write tests, participate in code reviews, and uphold engineering standards; the platform handles member PHI, so security and compliance hygiene are essential.

Use your skills to make an impact

Required Qualifications

- Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related degree

- 5+ years of backend software engineering, with hands-on production experience building on Apache Kafka/Confluent.

- Strong Java skills and experience designing event-driven services.

- Deep understanding of Kafka internals: partitioning, consumer groups, offsets, ordering, and delivery semantics.

- Solid grasp of distributed-systems fundamentals — idempotency, retries, backpressure, and failure handling in asynchronous systems.

- Experience operating services on cloud infrastructure (Azure or equivalent) with containers/Kubernetes and CI/CD.

- Clear communicator who can define and defend an event contract with partner teams.

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience with the Drools rules engine or another business rules management system.

- Familiarity with Kafka Streams, schema registry, and Avro/Protobuf.

- Experience with stream processing patterns and real-time data pipelines.

- Background in healthcare, insurance, or another regulated industry with PHI handling requirements.

Work Style: Remote/Hybrid - Preferably Boston, MA.

Occasional travel to Humana 's offices for training or meetings may be required.

Work Hours : Typical business hours are Monday-Friday, 8 hours/day, 5 days/week-- some flexibility might be possible, depending on business needs.

Very minimal travel might be required for training, meetings, and/or conferences
Interview Format

As part of our hiring process, we will be using on-demand technology provided by Hire Vue, a third-party vendor. This technology provides our team of recruiters and hiring managers with an enhanced method for decision-making through on-demand candidate assessments.

If you are selected to move forward from your application prescreen, you will receive correspondence inviting you to participate in an on-demand assessment with pre-determined questions. You should anticipate the assessment to take approximately 10-15 minutes.

Your on-demand assessment will be reviewed, and you will subsequently be informed if you will be moving forward to next round of interviews.
SSN Task via Workday

Should you be extended a formal employment offer you will receive a request to enter your SSN into our Wo