Senior Kafka & Flink Streaming Engineer (Onsite)

Unify Technologies Ltd; Woodlawn (MD); On-site; USD 124,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

Unify Technologies Ltd invites a Senior Data Streaming Engineer with deep Kafka and Flink expertise to join our on-site team in Woodlawn, MD. The role leads enterprise streaming architecture, builds reusable components, and raises security standards across CI/CD and deployment.

You will mentor teams, define reference architectures, and drive secure, scalable streaming solutions while ensuring compliance with federal security controls and stateful processing requirements.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field.
• 10+ years of progressive IT experience, including senior engineering, technical leadership, or advisory responsibilities.
• 5+ years of experience in enterprise-scale data streaming or secure software delivery environments.
• Expert-level knowledge of Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Java, Avro, and Confluent Schema Registry.
• Strong understanding of Kafka architecture, including brokers, partitions, replication, consumer groups, ISR behavior, retention, ACLs, and cluster operations.
• Experience designing and implementing secure CI/CD and DevSecOps pipelines using Jenkins, Maven, Bitbucket, and Nexus.
• Hands-on experience with vulnerability management, secure coding, dependency governance, and POA&M-aligned remediation.
• Experience implementing secure Kafka client authentication and communication using SSL/mTLS and SASL/OAUTHBEARER.
• Knowledge of schema governance, schema evolution, stateful streaming applications, and fault-tolerant distributed systems.
• Demonstrated ability to develop enterprise documentation, reference architectures, reusable components, and engineering standards.
• Strong communication, problem-solving, mentoring, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Ability to obtain and maintain SSA Public Trust clearance.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain enterprise reference architectures, standards, and best practices for Kafka, Flink, Kafka Streams, and microservices.
• Develop reusable streaming libraries, starter templates, and reference implementations to support consistent adoption across teams.
• Provide hands-on technical guidance to application and platform teams on streaming architecture and implementation.
• Serve as a senior escalation point for complex streaming issues, including consumer lag, serialization failures, state management, rebalancing, and performance bottlenecks.
• Establish standards for schema governance, fault tolerance, scalability, and distributed data processing.
• Collaborate with DevOps and Platform Engineering teams to establish secure CI/CD pipelines and deployment standards.
• Develop reusable pipeline patterns incorporating vulnerability scanning, dependency management, artifact promotion, and remediation workflows.
• Implement automated schema validation and Kafka topic provisioning checks within CI/CD pipelines.
• Define strategies for zero-downtime deployments, schema evolution, and safe stateful application upgrades.
• Integrate security policies and compliance requirements into software delivery processes.
• Define secure coding and dependency management standards for Java, Kafka, and Flink applications.
• Analyze vulnerability scan results and guide engineering teams in remediation.
• Support compliance with NIST security controls, POA&M, and federal patch management requirements.
• Implement secure Kafka client configurations using SSL/mTLS and SASL/OAUTHBEARER.
• Promote secure microservice development and enterprise security best practices.
• Apply deep knowledge of Kafka brokers, partitions, replication, consumer groups, ACLs, RBAC, retention policies, and cluster health.
• Troubleshoot ISR fluctuations, replication delays, consumer lag, and cluster performance issues.
• Guide teams through production incidents involving distributed streaming applications.
• Establish operational standards for monitoring, reliability, scalability, and fault tolerance.

Skills

Leadership

Mentoring

Cross-functional collaboration

Problem solving

Communication

Clearance eligibility

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/IT or related field

Tools

Apache Kafka

Apache Flink

Java

Avro

Confluent Schema Registry

Jenkins

Maven

Bitbucket

Nexus

Docker

Kubernetes

OpenShift

Job description

Unify Technologies Ltd invites a Senior Data Streaming Engineer with deep Kafka and Flink expertise to join our on-site team in Woodlawn, MD. The role leads enterprise streaming architecture, builds reusable components, and raises security standards across CI/CD and deployment.

You will mentor teams, define reference architectures, and drive secure, scalable streaming solutions while ensuring compliance with federal security controls and stateful processing requirements.