Lead Data Engineer (Kafka)

Location: Remote nationwide within the United States; primary location listed as Greenwood Village, Colorado. Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S.; visa sponsorship, including CPT/OPT sponsorship, is not available.

Base salary: $125,400–$181,875 per year, with eligibility for a bonus program.

Company

hirify.global provides financial services focused on helping customers achieve financial freedom.

What you will do

• Lead the design and implementation of scalable data pipelines, ingestion frameworks, and real-time streaming solutions.
• Build and optimize Kafka producers and consumers using Python, Java, Go, or Scala for sub-second latency and high availability.
• Implement CDC and stream-processing solutions across relational and NoSQL systems using tools such as Debezium, AWS DMS, Flink, Spark Streaming, and Kafka Streams.
• Manage schema evolution, data contracts, delivery guarantees, idempotency, monitoring, alerting, consumer offsets, partition rebalancing, and dead-letter queues.
• Integrate automated code generation, validation agents, and LLM-driven orchestration for schema drift, unstructured event parsing, and dynamic routing.
• Guide architecture and technical decisions, mentor engineers, lead code reviews, and translate complex business requirements into scalable data solutions.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent training and experience.
• 6–8+ years of enterprise-scale data engineering experience and 6–8+ years of hands-on experience with Kafka, Confluent Cloud, AWS Kinesis, or Apache Pulsar.
• Advanced proficiency in Python, PySpark, and SQL, plus production experience with Flink, Kafka Streams, or Spark Structured Streaming.
• Strong experience with AWS, CDC tools, Kafka Connect, data modeling, ETL/ELT, data warehousing, and modern data platforms.
• Experience with Apache Iceberg or Delta Lake, Snowflake or BigQuery, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI/CD automation.
• Experience leading technical initiatives and mentoring engineers, with strong problem-solving, communication, and Agile collaboration skills.

Nice to have

• Experience integrating AI agents to self-heal pipeline failures, resolve schema drift, and extract structured data from unstructured event streams.
• Experience with resilient fallback strategies, dead-letter reprocessing, circuit breakers, deterministic idempotency keys, Event Sourcing, and CQRS.
• Experience establishing enterprise data contracts and schema registry practices for lifecycle versioning and compatibility.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible remote work environment with support for work-life balance and professional growth.
• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance.
• 401(k) plan with company matching contributions of up to 6% and financial advisory services.
• Tuition reimbursement of up to $5,250 per year.
• Paid time off, company holidays, floating holidays, paid volunteer time, parental leave, disability coverage, and FMLA programs.
• Business Resource Groups supporting inclusion and collaboration.