Senior Software Engineer (Kafka)

Location: Denver, United States; hybrid work. The role includes US-hours ownership of Level 3 and Level 4 incidents, with collaboration across the ESM team based in Europe.

Salary: up to $160,000 per year, depending on experience.

Company

hirify.global develops a platform for API management, event management, and AI agent security.

What you will do

• Design and deliver end-to-end features from discovery and technical design through implementation, testing, release, and iteration.
• Build and maintain the hirify.global Event Gateway and the event-streaming experience in Gamma, using Kafka as the primary protocol.
• Work with Kafka wire protocols and ecosystem components, including MirrorMaker, Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, schema registries, service providers, and Kafka GitOps tools.
• Implement Kafka security features including OAuth, PLAIN, SCRAM, SASL, SSL, and Kafka ACLs.
• Build observability and alerting using JMX metrics, consumer lag tracking, and latency budgeting under a proxy hop; apply asynchronous, non-blocking Netty/Vert.x patterns with backpressure.
• Own US-hours Level 3 and Level 4 escalations, write automated tests, use AI-assisted development tools, and collaborate with product managers, designers, engineers, and technical leaders.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience building and running production backend software on a team that ships and supports its own product, including personally resolving production incidents.
• Strong Java experience; C# is accepted when combined with object-oriented depth, plus Maven and a reactive, non-blocking stack such as Netty or Vert.x with backpressure.
• Solid understanding of asynchronous systems, event-driven architecture patterns, and the Kafka wire protocol and ecosystem, including MirrorMaker, Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, and schema registries.
• Working knowledge of Kafka broker semantics: partitions, replication, and consumer groups.
• Familiarity with Kafka security: OAuth, PLAIN, SCRAM, SASL, SSL, and Kafka ACLs.
• Experience with streaming-system observability, including JMX metrics, consumer lag, and latency budgeting under a proxy hop.
• Git-based workflow, code review, and writing automated tests.
• Hands-on experience using LLMs or AI coding assistants in engineering workflows, with the judgment to review and improve generated output.
• Clear communication, collaborative problem-solving, and the ability to take an ambiguous problem through to production.

Nice to have

• Experience at a streaming vendor or on a Kafka platform team at a large company.
• Experience operating MSK or Confluent Cloud at scale and benchmarking network-service performance.
• Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud-native application delivery experience.
• Working knowledge of Angular and TypeScript.
• Open-source software or enterprise developer-platform experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work culture with hubs across regions and collaboration in an international environment.
• Medical coverage, pension or 401(k) program options, and stock options.
• 25 days of holiday plus in-country national holidays, three mental health days, and a wellness allowance.
• Birthday day off, professional development budget, quarterly team events, and an annual company offsite.
• Opportunities to grow scope and career as the company grows.