Kafka Platform Engineer (Confluent)

Location: 100% remote within the United States

Salary: $130,000–$180,000 annually, based on experience

Company

hirify.global is a technology consulting and software development company delivering cloud, AI, data, and enterprise solutions across the United States.

What you will do

• Architect, deploy, and manage highly available Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform environments for enterprise-scale event-driven applications.
• Design cluster topology, broker configuration, partitioning, replication, capacity planning, and performance optimization for high-throughput workloads.
• Implement Kafka security with SASL, SSL/mTLS, ACLs, RBAC, encryption, and enterprise authentication mechanisms.
• Design and manage Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Kafka Streams, ksqlDB, and real-time event-streaming pipelines.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning with Terraform, Ansible, or similar Infrastructure as Code tools, including Kubernetes-based deployments.
• Implement high availability, disaster recovery, backup, failover, cross-region replication, monitoring, observability, and long-term platform improvements.

Requirements

• Must be authorized to work in the United States as a U.S. citizen, Green Card holder, EAD holder, or H-1B transfer candidate.
• 10+ years of professional experience in distributed systems, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering, including 5+ years with Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform.
• Expert knowledge of Kafka internals, including partitions, replication, brokers, ISR, consumer groups, offset management, and performance tuning.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka security, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Kafka Streams, ksqlDB, high availability, disaster recovery, and multi-cluster replication.
• Advanced scripting with Python, Bash, or Go and Infrastructure as Code experience with Terraform, Ansible, or similar tools.
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK, distributed tracing, troubleshooting, documentation, stakeholder management, and technical leadership.

Nice to have

• Confluent Certified Administrator or Confluent Certified Developer certification.
• Experience operating Kafka on Kubernetes with Strimzi, Confluent Operator, or similar operators.
• Experience with AWS MSK, Confluent Cloud, Azure Event Hubs with Kafka API, or Google Cloud Managed Kafka.
• Experience with Apache Flink, Apache Spark Structured Streaming, or Apache Beam.
• Knowledge of data governance, schema evolution, metadata management, and data lineage for streaming platforms.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time direct W2 employment.
• Remote work within the United States.
• Career growth opportunities within an established consulting and software development organization.
• Collaboration with application developers, data engineers, DevOps, SRE, and enterprise architects.