Senior Kafka Engineer - Remote, Cloud & SRE Lead

Bright Vision Technologies; Cranberry Township (Butler County); Remote; USD 100,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Bright Vision Technologies is seeking an experienced Kafka Engineer to architect, deploy, and operate large-scale Apache Kafka and Confluent environments in a remote US setting. You will own the platform end-to-end, including sizing, configuration, security, automation, observability, and developer enablement, partnering with product and engineering teams.

The ideal candidate has deep Kafka internals knowledge, strong DevOps/SRE practices, and a track record of delivering reliable streaming

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.

Responsibilities

• Architect, deploy, and operate large-scale Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform clusters across on-prem and cloud environments.
• Design partitioning, replication, and topic strategies that balance throughput, durability, and operational simplicity.
• Implement strong security on Kafka clusters using SASL, mTLS, ACLs, RBAC, and integration with corporate IdPs.
• Operate Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, KSQL/ksqlDB, and Kafka Streams in production.
• Build and operate Kafka Connect pipelines integrating sources and sinks across enterprise systems.
• Design HA/DR strategies for Kafka, including MirrorMaker 2, Cluster Linking, and multi-region active-active patterns.
• Build CI/CD pipelines for Kafka topic, ACL, and connector configurations using GitOps patterns.
• Implement comprehensive observability using Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or Confluent Control Center.
• Drive Kafka cost and capacity optimization through right-sizing and storage tiering.
• Onboard application teams to Kafka with clear patterns, templates, and best practices.
• Lead incident response and post-incident reviews for streaming workloads, applying disciplined engineering practices and partnering closely with stakeholders to ensure outcomes are durable, well-documented, and aligned with broader team and platform standards.
• Mentor and coach junior and mid-level engineers through code review, design review, pair programming, and structured knowledge sharing, helping the broader team grow in technical maturity and confidence over time.
• Maintain comprehensive, current technical documentation — including architecture diagrams, design decisions, configuration references, runbooks, and operational procedures — so that the system remains supportable, auditable, and easy to onboard new engineers onto over time.
• Continuously evaluate emerging streaming technologies (Pulsar, Redpanda, AWS MSK, Azure Event Hubs).

Skills

Apache Kafka

Confluent Platform

DevOps

SRE

Python

Bash

Go

Terraform

Ansible

Kubernetes

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kafka Connect

Schema Registry

ksqlDB

Kafka Streams

Strimzi

Confluent Operator

AWS MSK

Job description

Bright Vision Technologies is seeking an experienced Kafka Engineer to architect, deploy, and operate large-scale Apache Kafka and Confluent environments in a remote US setting. You will own the platform end-to-end, including sizing, configuration, security, automation, observability, and developer enablement, partnering with product and engineering teams.

The ideal candidate has deep Kafka internals knowledge, strong DevOps/SRE practices, and a track record of delivering reliable streaming