AI-Powered Kafka Platform Engineer – On-Site Austin

Spectraforce Technologies, Inc.; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Spectraforce Technologies, Inc. is seeking a Kafka Platform Engineer for an on-site, 12-month assignment in Austin. The role emphasizes designing secure Kafka architectures, HA/DR, and enterprise-grade data integration, with AI-enabled development and DevOps capabilities.

You will work across data streaming, AI development, and automation, collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver scalable distributed systems and reliable operations.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in distributed systems and enterprise platform engineering.
• Extensive hands on experience with Confluent Kafka Platform (on prem and cloud).
• Strong background in Linux/Unix environments, networking, OS performance, and security.
• Proven experience with automation, DevOps, and operational tooling.
• Experience leveraging AI powered tools to accelerate development and improve team productivity and efficiency.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Strong organizational, relationship management, and teamwork skills.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement secure Kafka architectures, including authentication, authorization, encryption, and network isolation.
• Define and support high availability, disaster recovery, and data replication strategies.
• Ensure alignment with enterprise security, compliance, and governance standards.
• Advise on data ingestion, event streaming, batch and stream processing architectures.
• Provide guidance on data modeling and serialization standards (Avro, Protobuf, JSON Schema).
• Support enterprise integration use cases and resolve complex Kafka related integration challenges.
• Design and build AI agents, custom skills, or equivalent frameworks to automate engineering workflows at scale.
• Leverage AI-powered tools to accelerate development, automate testing, improve code quality, and enable intelligent SDLC workflows.
• Lead automation first operations using Python, Ansible, and scripting.
• Build and maintain self service operational tools to reduce day to day support overhead.
• Integrate Kafka platform operations with DevOps and CI/CD tooling.
• Lead deep dive investigations into production issues and outages.
• Perform root cause analysis, document findings, and drive remediation to closure.
• Act as trusted technical advisor to Schwab engineering, operations, and leadership teams.
• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Skills

Confluent Kafka

On-Prem & Cloud

Linux/Unix

Automation & DevOps

AI-assisted development

Incident management

Communication skills

Security & Networking

GitHub Copilot

Distributed systems

Tools

Azure

Jenkins

Puppet

Chef

Ansible

GitHub Copilot

Job description

Spectraforce Technologies, Inc. is seeking a Kafka Platform Engineer for an on-site, 12-month assignment in Austin. The role emphasizes designing secure Kafka architectures, HA/DR, and enterprise-grade data integration, with AI-enabled development and DevOps capabilities.

You will work across data streaming, AI development, and automation, collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver scalable distributed systems and reliable operations.