Lead Kafka Architect: Enterprise Streaming & Leadership

System One, Inc.; Pittsburgh (Allegheny County); On-site; USD 117,000 - 193,000; Part time

Job summary

System One, Inc. in Pittsburgh is seeking a Lead Kafka Developer to design and implement streaming architectures and data pipelines using Apache Kafka.

This contract role is onsite with 40-hour weeks and requires strong production Kafka experience. You will lead engineering efforts, mentor teammates, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure reliability, scalability, and security of event-driven solutions.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience.
• Extensive experience engineering with Kafka in production.
• Proficient in Apache Kafka producers, consumers, streams, and connectors.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems and event-driven architecture.
• Experience with Schema Registry and performance tuning.
• Excellent communication and leadership abilities to mentor teams.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop Kafka-based streaming architectures and data pipelines.
• Manage Kafka cluster setup, configuration, tuning, monitoring, and upgrades.
• Define standards for topic design, schema management, security, and reliability.
• Collaborate with platform, application, and data engineering teams.
• Troubleshoot production issues and perform root-cause analysis.
• Provide technical leadership, mentoring, and code reviews.
• Support enterprise event-driven solutions and scalable messaging systems.

Skills

Kafka

Java/Scala

Distributed Systems

Event-Driven Architecture

Kafka Monitoring

Schema Registry

Leadership & Mentoring

Production Support

Education

Bachelor’s Degree

Job description

System One, Inc. in Pittsburgh is seeking a Lead Kafka Developer to design and implement streaming architectures and data pipelines using Apache Kafka.

This contract role is onsite with 40-hour weeks and requires strong production Kafka experience. You will lead engineering efforts, mentor teammates, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure reliability, scalability, and security of event-driven solutions.