Senior Kafka Architect (Only w2)

Job Title: Senior Confluent Kafka & Flink Streaming Architect

Location: Onsite in Columbus, OH

Duration: 6 months

Contract: w2(No c2c)

Job Description/ Responsibilities:

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).