Senior Software Engineer - Kafka Platform (Apache Kafka)

Location: Ireland; hybrid work options with the option to collaborate onsite in the Galway office.

Company

hirify.global develops AI-powered customer and employee experience technology, including a platform connecting people, systems, data, and AI for more than 8,000 organizations.

What you will do

• Design, develop, test, deploy, and operate highly available event-streaming services and platform capabilities built around Apache Kafka.
• Lead technical design and implementation for complex distributed-system and streaming-platform initiatives.
• Improve the scalability, reliability, performance, security, and cost efficiency of Kafka infrastructure and supporting services.
• Develop automation and tooling for platform operations, deployment, monitoring, and troubleshooting.
• Diagnose complex production issues and implement sustainable solutions that improve platform resilience.
• Collaborate with analytics, platform, product, and engineering teams; contribute through architecture discussions, code reviews, mentoring, documentation, and knowledge sharing.

Requirements

• Significant professional experience developing and operating production software or platform services.
• Strong proficiency in Java with working experience in Python, or strong proficiency in Python with working experience in Java.
• Experience designing and operating distributed, event-driven, or data-intensive systems.
• Hands-on experience administering and operating Apache Kafka in production, including platform reliability, performance, scaling, and troubleshooting; comparable event-streaming experience may also be considered.
• Experience operating production systems in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or comparable cloud environments.
• Strong understanding of availability, consistency, fault tolerance, and scalability in distributed systems.
• Experience with automated testing, CI/CD, observability, source control, and production operations.
• Ability to influence technical decisions and communicate complex concepts clearly across teams.

Nice to have

• Deep Apache Kafka experience covering topics, partitions, consumer groups, replication, performance tuning, and failure recovery.
• Experience with Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, Schema Registry, or related streaming technologies.
• Experience with Kubernetes, containers, and infrastructure-as-code technologies.
• Knowledge of monitoring and observability practices for large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience improving performance, capacity, availability, or cost efficiency of high-throughput production platforms.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible work options, including hybrid schedules, work-from-home flexibility, and onsite collaboration.
• Continuous learning, mentoring, leadership development, education support, and career advancement opportunities.
• Employer-supported pension scheme, annual bonus, private health insurance, dental plan, wellness support, income protection, and life assurance.
• Generous paid maternity and paternity leave, paid volunteer time, August Free Fridays, and well-being resources.
• Work on AI-powered enterprise technology used by more than 8,000 organizations worldwide within a flexible-first global team.

Hiring process

• Application review by the Talent Acquisition team and hiring team.
• Potential Zoom interview with a Talent Acquisition Partner, followed by interviews with the hiring manager and other interviewers.
• The process typically includes no more than five interviews, followed by final steps.