Senior Kafka Engineer — Remote, Streaming Platform Ops

Bright Vision Technologies; Port Reading (NJ); 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 platform environments supporting mission-critical workloads. In this role you will own the Kafka platform end-to-end, including cluster sizing, configuration, security, automation, observability, and developer enablement.

The ideal candidate will combine deep Kafka internals knowledge with strong DevOps and SRE practices, and will partner with application

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Five+ years of experience operating Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform in production.
• Deep 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 patterns, templates, and best practices.
• Lead incident response and post-incident reviews for streaming workloads with durable outcomes.
• Mentor and coach junior engineers through code reviews and design reviews.
• Maintain comprehensive technical documentation for architecture, runbooks, and procedures.
• Continuously evaluate emerging streaming technologies (Pulsar, Redpanda, AWS MSK, Azure Event Hubs).

Skills

Kafka

Distributed systems

SRE practices

DevOps collaboration

Troubleshooting

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kafka Connect

Schema Registry

KSQL/ksqlDB

Terraform

Ansible

Strimzi

Confluent Platform

Job description

Bright Vision Technologies is seeking an experienced Kafka Engineer to architect, deploy, and operate large-scale Apache Kafka and Confluent platform environments supporting mission-critical workloads. In this role you will own the Kafka platform end-to-end, including cluster sizing, configuration, security, automation, observability, and developer enablement.

The ideal candidate will combine deep Kafka internals knowledge with strong DevOps and SRE practices, and will partner with application