| Location | Charlotte, NC |
Onsite in Columbus, OH
Max ####: ####-####
Job Title: Senior Confluent Kafka & Flink Streaming Architect
Experience: 12+ years overall (8+ years for Senior Engineer level); 5+ years in event streaming
About the Role
We are looking for a Senior Streaming Architect / Engineer to design, build, and run our enterprise real-time data platform on Confluent Cloud and Apache Flink. You will lead the move from legacy batch and ETL workloads to a cloud-native, event-driven architecture on AWS and GCP. You will set technical direction, mentor engineers, and work with business and executive stakeholders.
Key Responsibilities:
Architect multi-region, highly available Confluent Cloud environments with DR strategies (Cluster Linking, cross-region replication) supporting 200K+ events/sec.
Design and build real-time pipelines in Apache Flink (DataStream, Table, and SQL APIs): event-time processing, watermarks, late-event handling, windowed aggregations (tumbling, hopping, session), and stream joins.
Implement stateful, fault-tolerant processing with checkpointing, savepoints, and exactly-once semantics; tune parallelism, state backends, and operator chaining.
Build and manage Kafka Connect source/sink connectors (CDC, RDBMS, S3, analytics platforms) with SMTs and DLQ/retry patterns.
Own schema governance through Schema Registry (Avro/JSON/Protobuf) and compatibility rules.
Develop event-driven microservices and Kafka Streams / ksqlDB applications using Java and Spring Boot.
Lead migrations of on-prem middleware and Confluent Platform workloads to Confluent Cloud and AWS (EKS) with zero-downtime cutover.
Automate infrastructure with Terraform (Confluent, AWS, GCP providers) and GitOps CI/CD (Harness, Jenkins).
Implement secure connectivity (Private Service Connect, VPC, PrivateLink), RBAC, ACLs, SSL/SASL, and audit logging.
Set up observability (Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, Splunk); lead incident response, RCA, and performance tuning.
Optimize partitioning, retention, and capacity to reduce infrastructure cost.
Lead and mentor Kafka/Flink engineers, run training sessions, and communicate architecture trade-offs to leadership.
Required Qualifications
12+ years in software, integration, or data engineering, with 5+ years hands-on with Apache Kafka / Confluent in production.
Strong hands-on experience with Apache Flink (DataStream API and Flink SQL), including state management and checkpoint tuning.
Deep Kafka knowledge: partitioning, replication/ISR, retention, compaction, Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, ksqlDB.
Experience running Confluent Cloud in an enterprise setting on AWS and/or GCP.
Advanced Java (11+) and Spring Boot; proficiency in Python and SQL.
Experience with Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes (EKS / GKE / OpenShift).
Experience with CI/CD tools (Jenkins, Harness) and monitoring stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk).
Proven cloud migration experience, from assessment and planning through cutover.
Strong communication skills and experience with stakeholders in regulated industries.
Preferred Qualifications
Confluent Certified Developer / Administrator for Apache Kafka; Confluent Certified Data Streaming Engineer (Flink).
AWS Solutions Architect certification.
Experience with Amazon MSK, Managed Service for Apache Flink, Kinesis, EMR, Glue, and MWAA.
PySpark experience for batch and streaming ETL.
Familiarity with Snowflake, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and DB2 as sources or sinks.
Experience with CDC patterns and legacy integration platforms (IBM MQ, IIB, mainframe).
Domain background in healthcare, insurance, banking/finance, or retail.
Tools & Technologies:
Confluent Cloud, Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, ksqlDB, Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, AWS (EKS, MSK, S3, IAM, VPC), GCP (GKE, Pub/Sub, PSC), Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, Jenkins, Harness, Java / Spring Boot, Python, PySpark, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk.
Must-have: Confluent Kafka production experience and hands-on Apache Flink (not just Kafka Streams).
Ask about: Flink checkpointing/savepoints, watermarks and late events, exactly-once guarantees, Cluster Linking DR design.
Strong signal: Confluent Cloud migration from on-prem, Terraform-based provisioning, and Confluent certifications.
Profile titles to search: Kafka Architect, Confluent Architect, Streaming Data Engineer, Flink Engineer, Event Streaming Solution Architect.