Sr. Open Source Software Engineer (Kafka)

Location: United States — Morrisville, North Carolina; San Jose, California; Waltham, Massachusetts; Raleigh, Boston, or Seattle. Requires 3 days per week in the office.

Salary: $220,000–$265,000 per year, with final compensation based on location, qualifications, experience, and education.

Company

hirify.global provides intelligent data infrastructure, unified storage, integrated data services, and managed open-source data platforms through hirify.global Instaclustr.

What you will do

• Lead upstream Apache Kafka initiatives from KIP authoring and design consensus through implementation, review, and release.
• Provide binding committer reviews for Kafka patches and community contributions.
• Contribute to release planning, blocker triage, test stabilization, release candidate validation, documentation readiness, 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.
• Mentor contributors and improve CI reliability, test coverage, benchmarking, contributor tooling, release automation, and compatibility validation.

Requirements

• Current Apache Kafka committer status with a sustained, publicly verifiable upstream record across patches, reviews, KIPs, and community participation.
• At least 12 years of applicable professional software engineering experience.
• Expert Java skills for performance-sensitive, concurrent, production-grade distributed systems.
• Deep Apache Kafka expertise in at least one major area, such as broker storage, replication, KRaft, metadata management, consumer groups, protocols, Streams, Connect, observability, performance, or release engineering.
• Experience leading technical work through the Apache governance model, including KIP authoring, design consensus, mailing-list engagement, and Jira-based delivery.
• Strong written communication for asynchronous public collaboration through mailing lists, design documents, code reviews, and Jira.

Nice to have

• PMC membership in Apache Kafka or a related Apache project.
• Experience with current Kafka feature and maintenance areas, including KRaft maturity, metadata reliability, consumer rebalance protocols, exactly-once semantics, tiered storage, and release stabilization.
• Experience connecting upstream technical leadership to enterprise customer and operator outcomes.
• Mentoring experience in open-governance projects.
• Familiarity with Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, MirrorMaker 2, Kafka clients, schema and serialization patterns, Kubernetes-based Kafka operations, or Strimzi.

Culture & Benefits

• Globally distributed open-source engineering team with up to 10% travel.
• High-trust, high-accountability environment with significant autonomy and close collaboration.
• Comprehensive benefits package that may include health and life insurance, retirement or pension plans, paid time off, leave options, performance incentives, employee stock purchase plans, and RSUs.
• Hybrid working environment with in-office and in-person expectations.
• Support for professional flexibility, ownership, initiative, and work-life balance.

Hiring process

• Applications are reviewed through the hirify.global company website.
• Some stages for select roles may use AI tools to support application evaluation and candidate selection.