Senior Kafka Engineer - Remote Backend Streaming Lead

Humana; Louisville (KY); Hybrid; USD 107,000 - 147,000; Full time

Job summary

Humana Senior Kafka Developer role designs and operates event streaming that connects the rules engine to the decisioning system. You own Kafka topics, producers, and consumers, ensuring reliable, in-order delivery under production load.

This hands-on backend position requires strong Java skills, deep Kafka knowledge, and experience with cloud infrastructure, containers, and CI/CD. You will collaborate to define event contracts and uphold security/compliance for PHI.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field.
• 5+ years of backend software engineering with hands-on Kafka experience.
• Strong Java skills and event-driven service design.
• Deep Kafka internals knowledge: partitioning, ordering, exactly-once semantics.
• Experience on cloud infrastructure (Azure) with containers/Kubernetes and CI/CD.
• Clear communicator for defining and defending event contracts.

Responsibilities

• Event streaming - Design, build, and own Kafka producers, consumers, and topic strategy that carry rules-engine inputs and outputs across the platform.
• Rules engine integration - Integrate the Java/Drools rules engine with upstream and downstream systems through well-designed event and API contracts.
• Reliability - Engineer for correctness under load: partitioning, ordering, idempotency, exactly-once or effectively-once semantics, retries, and dead-letter handling.
• Backend services - Build and maintain the Java services around the rules engine that produce and consume events and expose APIs.
• Performance and scale - Profile and tune streaming throughput and latency; ensure the pipeline scales as event volume grows.
• Observability - Instrument streams and services with logging, metrics, and alerting so issues are caught early and diagnosed quickly.
• Quality - Write tests, participate in code reviews, and uphold engineering standards; the platform handles member PHI, so security and compliance hygiene are essential.

Skills

Backend engineering

Java

Kafka/Confluent

Event-driven design

Cloud (Azure)

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field

Tools

Kafka

Confluent

Azure

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Job description

Humana Senior Kafka Developer role designs and operates event streaming that connects the rules engine to the decisioning system. You own Kafka topics, producers, and consumers, ensuring reliable, in-order delivery under production load.

This hands-on backend position requires strong Java skills, deep Kafka knowledge, and experience with cloud infrastructure, containers, and CI/CD. You will collaborate to define event contracts and uphold security/compliance for PHI.