Remote Real-Time Data Engineer: Kafka Platform Lead

Socket.dev; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 135,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Bright Vision Technologies is seeking an experienced Real-Time Data Engineer to architect, deploy, and operate large-scale Apache Kafka and Confluent environments in support of mission-critical workloads. You will own the Kafka platform end-to-end, including sizing, security, automation, observability, and developer enablement.

Collaborate with product, design, engineering, operations, and business stakeholders to translate ambiguous requirements into well-engineered streaming solutions, raising

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Five or more years of experience operating Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform in production.
• Deep, hands‑on knowledge of Kafka internals (partitions, replication, ISRs, consumer groups).
• Strong experience with Kafka security (SASL, mTLS, ACLs, RBAC).
• Hands‑on experience with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and either Kafka Streams or ksqlDB.
• Experience with HA/DR strategies for Kafka.
• Strong scripting skills in Python, Bash, or Go.
• Hands‑on experience with infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform, Ansible).
• Working knowledge of observability tooling for Kafka.
• Excellent troubleshooting, communication, and documentation skills.

Skills

Kafka internals knowledge

SRE practices

Troubleshooting

Communication

Documentation

Security awareness

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Kafka Connect

Schema Registry

Kafka Streams / ksqlDB

Kubernetes (Strimzi / Confluent Operator)

Job description

Bright Vision Technologies is seeking an experienced Real-Time Data Engineer to architect, deploy, and operate large-scale Apache Kafka and Confluent environments in support of mission-critical workloads. You will own the Kafka platform end-to-end, including sizing, security, automation, observability, and developer enablement.

Collaborate with product, design, engineering, operations, and business stakeholders to translate ambiguous requirements into well-engineered streaming solutions, raising