Senior Kafka Architect: Real-Time Streaming & Clusters

Sage IT; New Jersey; On-site; USD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Sage IT is seeking an experienced Kafka Consultant to lead design, deployment, and optimization of enterprise-grade Kafka clusters across Texas or New Jersey. You will own event-driven architecture implementations, stream processing, and cross-functional collaboration with clients and technical leadership.

Ideal candidates bring deep expertise in Kafka, Connect, Streams, and Schema Registry, plus strong consulting experience and security-aware practices.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, IT, Software Engineering, or related field.
• Progressive hands-on experience in distributed systems architecture and Kafka.
• Operational expertise in Kafka cluster administration, tuning, and API development.
• Experience with Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, Schema Registry.
• Knowledge of microservices communication patterns and cloud deployments.
• Consulting experience advising enterprise clients on streaming architecture.

Responsibilities

• Architect and optimize Kafka clusters, topics, and pipelines across environments.
• Provide advisory on event-driven architecture and streams processing.
• Build and maintain Kafka producers/consumers and Connect pipelines.
• Monitor cluster health, throughput, and consumer lag.
• Collaborate with data architects, engineers, and leadership.
• Troubleshoot streaming bottlenecks and serialization errors.
• Ensure data security practices and access controls.
• Develop runbooks and client advisory reports.
• Lead workshops and design reviews.
• Mentor project teams on real-time data streaming best practices.

Skills

Kafka administration

Kafka Streams

Schema Registry

Cloud deployment

Microservices

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/IT/SE

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Confluent

Jira

Job description

Sage IT is seeking an experienced Kafka Consultant to lead design, deployment, and optimization of enterprise-grade Kafka clusters across Texas or New Jersey. You will own event-driven architecture implementations, stream processing, and cross-functional collaboration with clients and technical leadership.

Ideal candidates bring deep expertise in Kafka, Connect, Streams, and Schema Registry, plus strong consulting experience and security-aware practices.