Senior Kafka Architect & Streaming Platform Lead

BAM Ventures; San Jose (CA); Hybrid; USD 177,000 - 262,000; Full time

Job summary

PayPal's Venmo Data Infrastructure team is seeking a senior Kafka expert to own the streaming platform's technical roadmap and architecture. You will drive secure, scalable Kafka design across multi-region deployments, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product and analytics teams.

This leadership role requires deep hands-on Kafka experience, schemata governance, and experience upgrading and operating large streaming systems in production. Hybrid work is supported.

Qualifications

• 5+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR any equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field preferred or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical roadmap and architecture for Venmo's Kafka streaming platform, ensuring security, scalability, reliability, and performance.
• Set the technical direction and design patterns for Kafka cluster architecture and multi-tenant governance.
• Lead the design and rollout of Kafka lifecycle management, upgrades, capacity planning, and disaster recovery.
• Drive deep root-cause analysis for large-scale Kafka incidents.
• Define and evangelize best practices for producer/consumer design and schema governance.
• Establish and improve engineering standards, runbooks, and operational rigor for streaming infrastructure.
• Mentor engineers working on Kafka and streaming/data infrastructure.
• Partner with executives, product, engineering, and analytics to translate business needs into scalable architecture.

Skills

Kafka

Kafka security IAM

Schema Registry

Kafka Connect/Kafka Streams

Terraform/AWS

Python/Java

Multi-region architecture

Kafka upgrades

Leadership & mentoring

AWS services (S3, DMS, EKS)

Confluent Kafka certification (plus)

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

AWS (Terraform / CloudFormation)

Kafka ecosystem tooling

Job description

PayPal's Venmo Data Infrastructure team is seeking a senior Kafka expert to own the streaming platform's technical roadmap and architecture. You will drive secure, scalable Kafka design across multi-region deployments, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product and analytics teams.

This leadership role requires deep hands-on Kafka experience, schemata governance, and experience upgrading and operating large streaming systems in production. Hybrid work is supported.