Senior Open Source Software Engineer (Kafka)

Location: Based in San Jose, Raleigh, Boston, or Seattle, United States, with 3 days per week in the office. The team is globally distributed and the role requires up to 10% travel. Additional global opportunities are available in Cork, Ireland, and Schiphol, Netherlands.

Salary: $220,000–$265,000 per year, depending on location, qualifications, experience, and education. Comprehensive benefits vary by region.

Company

hirify.global provides intelligent data infrastructure, unified storage, integrated data services, and enterprise cloud solutions supporting workloads from traditional applications to AI and multicloud environments.

What you will do

• Lead Apache Kafka upstream initiatives from KIP authoring and design consensus through implementation, review, and release.
• Provide binding committer reviews for patches and community contributions across Kafka core and related components.
• Support Kafka release management, including planning, blocker triage, test stabilization, release candidate validation, and post-release follow-through.
• Translate enterprise customer and operator needs into upstream proposals and advise product and field teams on complex Kafka trade-offs.
• Influence Kafka architecture, protocol evolution, compatibility, release policy, contribution standards, and long-term roadmap decisions.
• Mentor engineers and improve CI reliability, test coverage, contributor tooling, benchmarking, release automation, and compatibility validation.

Requirements

• At least 12 years of applicable professional software engineering experience.
• Current Apache Kafka committer status with a sustained, publicly verifiable record across patches, reviews, KIPs, and community participation.
• Expert Java skills in performance-sensitive, concurrent, production-grade distributed systems.
• Deep expertise in at least one major Kafka domain, such as broker storage, log replication, KRaft, metadata management, consumer coordination, protocol compatibility, Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, observability, performance, or release engineering.
• Experience leading technical work through the Apache governance model, including KIP development, design consensus, mailing-list engagement, and Jira delivery.
• Strong written communication and senior-level technical judgment for complex, ambiguous, and independently driven work.

Nice to have

• PMC membership in Apache Kafka or a related Apache project.
• Experience with current Kafka initiatives such as KRaft maturity, metadata reliability, consumer rebalance improvements, exactly-once semantics, tiered storage, or release stabilization.
• Experience connecting upstream technical leadership with enterprise customer and operator outcomes.
• Mentoring experience in an open governance project and familiarity with Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, MirrorMaker 2, Kafka clients, schema and serialization patterns, Kubernetes-based Kafka operations, or Strimzi.
• Bachelor's degree in engineering or a related technical field, or equivalent experience.

Culture & Benefits

• High-trust, high-accountability environment with significant autonomy and close peer collaboration.
• Globally distributed open source engineering team focused on technical rigor, transparent community engagement, and customer impact.
• Health insurance, life insurance, retirement or pension plans, paid time off, leave options, and performance-based incentives, subject to regional conditions.
• Employee stock purchase plan and/or restricted stock units may be available depending on region.
• Hybrid working environment designed to support collaboration, connection, and work-life balance.

Hiring process

• Applications are reviewed through the hirify.global company website.
• Some stages may use AI tools to support application evaluation and candidate selection, with final decisions supported by human judgment.