Title-Senior Kafka SME
Location: Austin, TX
Onsite: 4 days a week
Contract: 12 months extendable
Interview process: 2 video interviews to hire
Role Overview We are seeking a senior Kafka expert who combines deep Confluent Kafka architecture experience, strong cloud and on-premise platform engineering skills, and modern AI-enabled development expertise. The ideal candidate will have a proven track record of automation, operational leadership, and enterprise stakeholder engagement. This role requires an on-site presence in Austin four days per week.
Key Responsibilities- Design and implement secure Kafka architectures, including authentication, authorization, encryption, and network isolation.
- Define and support high availability, disaster recovery, and data replication strategies, ensuring alignment with enterprise standards.
- Advise on data ingestion, event streaming, and batch and stream processing architectures.
- Provide guidance on data modeling and serialization standards such as Avro, Protobuf, and JSON Schema.
- Design and build AI agents and custom frameworks to automate engineering and operational workflows at scale.
- Leverage AI-powered tools like Copilot to accelerate development, automate testing, and improve code quality.
- Drive automation-first operations using Python, Ansible, and scripting, and build self-service operational tools.
- Lead deep-dive investigations into complex production issues, perform root cause analysis, and drive remediation.
- Act as a trusted technical advisor to engineering, operations, and leadership teams.
Required Qualifications Experience: 10+ years of experience in distributed systems, messaging, and enterprise platform engineering.
Technical Skills:- Extensive hands-on experience with the Confluent Kafka Platform, both on-premise and in the cloud.
- Proven ability to leverage AI-assisted development (e.g., Copilot, code generation) and build AI-driven agents/workflows.
- Strong background in Linux/Unix environments, networking, OS performance, and security.
- Proven experience with automation, DevOps, and operational tooling (e.g., Azure, Jenkins, Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Python).
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with strong organizational and teamwork abilities.
Preferred Qualifications- Confluent Kafka and/or Cloud certifications.
- Prior experience supporting large-scale, regulated enterprise environments.