Kafka Engineer

Fractal; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Fractal is seeking a skilled Kafka Engineer to design, build, and maintain high-performance real-time streaming pipelines using Confluent Platform. The ideal candidate will deploy and scale Kafka clusters across on-prem and cloud environments, ensuring high availability.

You will implement Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, KSQL, and FlinkSQL, and integrate pipelines with data lakes and warehouses. Collaboration with data engineers and backend teams is essential for success.

Qualifications

• Experience designing and operating real-time streaming pipelines.
• Hands-on with Kafka ecosystem components and Confluent Platform.
• Ability to deploy on-prem and cloud Kafka clusters with monitoring.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and manage Kafka and Confluent infrastructure for high throughput streaming applications.
• Implement Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and KSQL (KSQLDB), FlinkSQL
• Ensure high availability, performance tuning, and monitoring of Kafka clusters
• Collaborate with data engineers and backend teams to integrate streaming pipelines with data lakes, warehouses.
• Set up and enforce Kafka security mechanisms (SASL, SSL, ACLs, RBAC)
• Create and manage CI/CD pipelines for Kafka components using tools like Git, Jenkins, etc.
• Monitor and troubleshoot issues using tools like Confluent Control Center, DataDog

Skills

Java

Python

Stream processing

Event-driven architecture

Tools

Apache Kafka

Confluent Platform

Kafka Connect

Schema Registry

KSQL

FlinkSQL

Git

Jenkins

Kubernetes

Helm

Confluent Control Center

DataDog

Cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP)

Job description

It’s fun to work in a company where people truly BELIEVE in what they are doing!

We’re committed to bringing passion and customer focus to the business.

Job Summary

We are looking for a skilled Kafka Engineer with hands-on experience in Confluent Platform to design, build, and maintain high-performance, real-time data streaming pipelines. The ideal candidate will have expertise in Kafka ecosystem components and be well-versed in deploying and scaling Kafka clusters, both on-prem and in cloud environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and manage Kafka and Confluent infrastructure for high throughput streaming applications
• Implement Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and KSQL (KSQLDB), FlinkSQL
• Ensure high availability, performance tuning, and monitoring of Kafka clusters
• Collaborate with data engineers and backend teams to integrate streaming pipelines with data lakes, warehouses.
• Set up and enforce Kafka security mechanisms (SASL, SSL, ACLs, RBAC)
• Create and manage CI/CD pipelines for Kafka components using tools like Git, Jenkins, etc.
• Monitor and troubleshoot issues using tools like Confluent Control Center, DataDog

Required Skills

• Experience in Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform
• Experience with Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, Schema Registry, KSQL, and FlinkSQL
• Strong background in Java or Python
• Good understanding of stream processing and event-driven architecture
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms: AWS / Azure / GCP (esp. Confluent Cloud)
• Proficient in Kafka cluster deployment, tuning, and maintenance
• Familiarity with CI/CD, Git, Helm, and Kubernetes

Nice to Have

• Knowledge of Terraform, Pulumi, or other Infra as Code tools
• Exposure to DataOps / Data Engineering ecosystems

If you like wild growth and working with happy, enthusiastic over-achievers, you’ll enjoy your career with us!