Kafka Engineer

TL;DR

Kafka Engineer (Apache Kafka): Designing, developing, administering, and optimizing Kafka clusters and event-driven architectures for high-volume, mission-critical data flows in federal systems with an accent on real-time streaming pipelines, security, and system integration. Focus on managing clusters, performance tuning, capacity planning, and ensuring reliable data delivery across microservices.

Location: 100% Remote (US-based only)

Salary: $100,000 – $130,000 (commensurate with experience)

Company

hirify.global supports large-scale data streaming, system integration, and platform modernization for Federal Government stakeholders including CMS.

What you will do

• Design, build, administer, and maintain Kafka clusters across dev, test, and production environments, including topics, partitions, brokers, and retention policies.
• Develop event streaming pipelines using Kafka producers, consumers, and connectors for real-time data processing and integration with API Gateway microservices and backend systems.
• Monitor performance, throughput, latency; perform capacity planning, tuning, upgrades, and disaster recovery.
• Implement security best practices, authentication, encryption, auditing, and compliance with CMS standards.
• Collaborate with architects, developers, DevOps, and stakeholders on event schemas, troubleshooting, and documentation.

Requirements

• Must be eligible to obtain a Public Trust clearance and legally authorized to work in the US.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, IT, Engineering, or related field.
• 3+ years developing, administering, and supporting Apache Kafka in enterprise environments, including clusters, topics, partitions, and streaming pipelines.
• Experience integrating Kafka with microservices, API Gateways, and backend systems; strong knowledge of event-driven architectures and messaging patterns.
• Hands-on with Linux environments, command-line administration, troubleshooting, and performance tuning.
• Ability to communicate technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Experience supporting federal healthcare programs.
• Agile, Scrum, DevSecOps environments; CI/CD pipelines and automation.
• Cloud-based Kafka (AWS MSK); monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch).
• Schema Registry, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), cloud security.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time W2 employment, 40 hours/week with availability during core business hours.
• Work closely with Federal stakeholders, architects, developers, and DevOps teams.