Senior Kafka Platform Engineer - Event-Streaming & Cloud

STEPS Talent; United States; Hybrid; USD 162,000 - 198,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Base salary up to $180,000

Annual performance bonus

Annual profitability bonus

15% employer-funded MRA contribution

Hybrid work model

Job summary

STEPS Talent is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to build and operate a shared enterprise messaging and event-streaming platform. You will work close to the Kafka/messaging stack, ensuring reliability, scalability, observability, security, and usability for engineering teams.

The role emphasizes hands-on engineering with Kafka, Confluent/AWS MSK, Java/Spring Boot, REST APIs, and Terraform, while enabling platform capabilities across teams in a hybrid work environment.

Qualifications

• Hands-on Apache Kafka and enterprise messaging/platforms experience.
• Experience building/operating Kafka infra (brokers, topics, partitions, replication).
• Strong Java and Spring Boot development experience.
• Experience designing REST APIs.
• Experience with Terraform and Infrastructure as Code.
• Familiar with CI/CD, monitoring, and platform reliability.
• Understanding distributed systems and event-driven architecture.
• Ability to lead technical initiatives as a senior individual contributor.

Responsibilities

• Build, operate, and evolve Kafka/Confluent/AWS MSK messaging platforms.
• Maintain highly available Kafka environments and production troubleshooting.
• Develop platform services and APIs using Java, Spring Boot, REST.
• Build cloud-native capabilities with AWS and Kubernetes/EKS.
• Provision and automate infrastructure using Terraform.
• Improve reliability via automation, observability, and CI/CD.
• Troubleshoot complex distributed systems and performance issues.
• Create reusable, self-service platform capabilities for teams.
• Lead architecture decisions while remaining hands-on.

Skills

Kafka

Java

Spring Boot

REST APIs

Terraform

CI/CD

Observability

Distributed systems

Leadership as IC

Tools

Confluent Platform

Confluent Cloud

Amazon MSK

Kubernetes/EKS

Terraform (IaC)

Job description

STEPS Talent is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to build and operate a shared enterprise messaging and event-streaming platform. You will work close to the Kafka/messaging stack, ensuring reliability, scalability, observability, security, and usability for engineering teams.

The role emphasizes hands-on engineering with Kafka, Confluent/AWS MSK, Java/Spring Boot, REST APIs, and Terraform, while enabling platform capabilities across teams in a hybrid work environment.