Senior Kafka Platform Engineer (OpenShift/Strimzi)

Socket.dev; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous PTO (20 days)

Parental leave

Recognition & Rewards

Comprehensive insurance coverage

Job summary

Innovaccer Inc. is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Streaming team to own the messaging backbone of our on-premise platform, including Kafka, Schema Registry, and a self-hosted queue layer managed on OpenShift with Strimzi.

You will design patterns, libraries, and infrastructure to migrate hundreds of producer and consumer touchpoints from cloud queue services while ensuring reliability at scale.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend or data infrastructure experience with production Kafka ownership.
• Experience running Kafka on Kubernetes (Strimzi preferred) and managing schema evolution.
• Hands-on experience with at least one additional broker technology: RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ/Artemis, or NATS/JetStream.

Responsibilities

• Deploy and operate Kafka and Schema Registry on OpenShift via Strimzi: topic and partition design, retention policies, security, and quota management.
• Redesign integrations built on cloud queue services onto self-hosted brokers and define repeatable patterns for hundreds of producers and consumers.
• Build shared client patterns and libraries: retries, dead-letter queues, idempotent consumers, ordering guarantees, and backpressure handling.
• Integrate messaging with the platform's function runtime through KEDA-driven scaling of queue consumers.
• Own capacity planning for the messaging tier: broker disk and IO sizing, throughput modeling, and growth headroom.
• Monitor consumer lag and broker health, run failure-mode testing, and harden the tier against node and site failures.

Skills

Kafka ownership

Kubernetes

Java

Python

Go

OpenShift

Schema Registry

Messaging patterns

Dead-letter queues

Exactly-once processing

Education

B.E./B.Tech./M.Sc. in CS or related

Tools

RabbitMQ

ActiveMQ/Artemis

NATS/JetStream

Job description

Innovaccer Inc. is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Streaming team to own the messaging backbone of our on-premise platform, including Kafka, Schema Registry, and a self-hosted queue layer managed on OpenShift with Strimzi.

You will design patterns, libraries, and infrastructure to migrate hundreds of producer and consumer touchpoints from cloud queue services while ensuring reliability at scale.