Senior Kafka Platform Engineer - AI-Driven Data Streaming

Aquent; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 206,309,000 - 229,233,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Subsidized health, vision, and dental

Retirement plan with match

Job summary

Aquent in Austin, TX is seeking a Senior Kafka Platform Engineer for an on-site role. The position focuses on distributed data streaming architectures powering core financial services operations and requires hands-on Kafka and AI-enabled tooling expertise.

You will design secure, scalable pipelines, ensure reliability, and drive automation across the SDLC. Strong collaboration with engineering and operations teams is essential for success.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in distributed systems, messaging, and enterprise platform engineering.
• Extensive hands-on experience with Confluent Kafka Platform across on-prem and cloud.
• Experience leveraging AI-powered tools and building AI-driven agents to accelerate teams.
• Strong Linux/Unix, networking, OS performance and security skills.
• Automation, DevOps practices, and robust operational tooling experience.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement secure Kafka architectures with authentication, authorization, encryption, and network isolation.
• Define high availability, disaster recovery, and data replication strategies for critical systems.
• Ensure data streaming solutions meet security, compliance, and governance standards.
• Advise on ingestion, event streaming, batch and stream processing architectures.
• Provide guidance on data modeling and serialization (Avro, Protobuf, JSON Schema).
• Lead AI-driven agent initiatives to automate engineering and operational workflows.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams and vendors to achieve project goals.
• Drive automation-first operations using Python, Ansible, and scripting.

Skills

Distributed systems

Confluent Kafka

AI-powered tools

Linux/Unix

DevOps practices

GitHub Copilot

Tools

Confluent Kafka Platform

GitHub Copilot

Jenkins

Job description

Aquent in Austin, TX is seeking a Senior Kafka Platform Engineer for an on-site role. The position focuses on distributed data streaming architectures powering core financial services operations and requires hands-on Kafka and AI-enabled tooling expertise.

You will design secure, scalable pipelines, ensure reliability, and drive automation across the SDLC. Strong collaboration with engineering and operations teams is essential for success.