Senior Kafka Architect & Streaming Platform Lead

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

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Healthcare coverage

Paid time off

Job summary

PayPal's Venmo Data Infrastructure team seeks a senior Kafka architect to lead real-time data streaming across Venmo’s platform. You will define architecture, drive global deployment patterns, and mentor engineers while ensuring secure, scalable streaming for product and analytics teams.

Role emphasizes on-call ownership, cross-functional collaboration, and shaping engineering standards for streaming infrastructure.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 5+ years of relevant experience in streaming data and Kafka environments.
• Strong knowledge of Kafka architecture, security, and operations.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical roadmap and architecture for Venmo's Kafka streaming platform, ensuring it is secure, scalable, reliable, and performant for Venmo product, analytics, and downstream infrastructure teams.
• Set the technical direction and design patterns for Kafka cluster architecture, topic design, partitioning strategy, and multi‑tenant governance across the organization.
• Lead the design and rollout of Kafka lifecycle management, including cluster upgrades, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and multi‑region/multi‑cluster replication strategies.
• Drive deep root‑cause analysis and resolution for the most complex, large‑scale Kafka performance, reliability, and data‑loss incidents.
• Define and evangelize best practices for producer/consumer design, schema governance, and Kafka Connect/Kafka Streams usage across engineering teams.
• Establish and improve engineering standards, runbooks, and operational rigor for streaming infrastructure in partnership with management.
• Mentor and provide technical guidance to senior and junior engineers working on Kafka and adjacent streaming/data infrastructure.
• Partner with Executive, Product, Engineering, and Analytics stakeholders to translate business needs into scalable streaming architecture decisions.

Skills

Kafka

Streaming

AWS

Python

Java

Terraform

Schema Registry

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Master's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Terraform

AWS CloudFormation

Job description

PayPal's Venmo Data Infrastructure team seeks a senior Kafka architect to lead real-time data streaming across Venmo’s platform. You will define architecture, drive global deployment patterns, and mentor engineers while ensuring secure, scalable streaming for product and analytics teams.

Role emphasizes on-call ownership, cross-functional collaboration, and shaping engineering standards for streaming infrastructure.