Senior Kafka Engineer – Remote, Event-Driven Backend

Humana; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 107,000 - 147,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical benefits

401(k) retirement plan

Paid time off

Job summary

Humana is seeking a Senior Kafka Developer to design and operate the event streaming that connects Team Caliber to the decisioning system. You will own Kafka topics, producers, and consumers moving eligibility, suppression, and decisions through the platform with high throughput and fault tolerance.

The role is backend-focused, requiring hands-on experience with Java and Drools, and an ability to deliver reliable, scalable streaming under production load.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field.
• 5+ years of backend software engineering with hands-on experience with Apache Kafka/Confluent.
• Strong Java skills and experience designing event-driven services.
• Deep understanding of Kafka internals: partitioning, consumer groups, offsets, ordering, delivery semantics.
• Experience operating services on cloud infrastructure (Azure or equivalent) with containers/Kubernetes and CI/CD.
• Clear communicator capable of defining and defending an event contract with partner teams.

Responsibilities

• Event streaming — design, build, and own Kafka producers, consumers, and topic strategy.
• Rules engine integration — connect Java/Drools rules engine with upstream/downstream systems via event and API contracts.
• Reliability — ensure correctness under load: partitioning, ordering, idempotency, exactly-once or effectively-once semantics, retries, DLQ handling.
• Backend services — build and maintain Java services around the rules engine that produce/consume events and expose APIs.
• Performance and scale — profile and tune streaming throughput and latency; scale with event volume.
• Observability — instrument streams and services with logging, metrics, and alerting.
• Quality — write tests, code reviews, uphold engineering standards; handle PHI securely and compliantly.

Skills

Backend engineering

Java

Kafka/Confluent

Event-driven design

Cloud & Kubernetes

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS

Tools

Azure

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Schema registry

Job description

Humana is seeking a Senior Kafka Developer to design and operate the event streaming that connects Team Caliber to the decisioning system. You will own Kafka topics, producers, and consumers moving eligibility, suppression, and decisions through the platform with high throughput and fault tolerance.

The role is backend-focused, requiring hands-on experience with Java and Drools, and an ability to deliver reliable, scalable streaming under production load.