Senior Platform Engineer – Kafka & Enterprise Messaging

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

Work Model: Hybrid - 3 days onsite per week

Base Salary: Up to $180,000 + bonus + retirement benefits

The Opportunity:

We are hiring a Senior Platform Engineer for a leading global investment management firm. This is a senior, hands-on individual contributor role focused on building, operating, and evolving a shared enterprise messaging and event-streaming platform used by engineering teams across the organization.

This is not primarily a business application development role. We are looking for an engineer who has worked close to the underlying Kafka/messaging platform and understands how to make distributed platforms reliable, scalable, observable, secure, and easy for other engineering teams to use.

What You'll Do

• Build, operate, and evolve enterprise Kafka / Confluent / Amazon MSK messaging and event-streaming capabilities.
• Engineer and support highly available Kafka environments, including topics, partitions, replication, consumer groups, connectors, schemas, security, monitoring, upgrades, and production troubleshooting.
• Develop platform services and APIs using Java, Spring Boot, and REST APIs.
• Build and operate cloud-native platform capabilities using AWS and Kubernetes/EKS.
• Provision and automate infrastructure using Terraform / Infrastructure as Code.
• Improve platform reliability through automation, CI/CD, observability, monitoring, resiliency, and operational tooling.
• Troubleshoot complex distributed-system and production issues involving performance, consumer lag, availability, scaling, and failure recovery.
• Create reusable and self-service platform capabilities that enable application engineering teams.
• Lead technical initiatives and architecture decisions while remaining hands-on with engineering and implementation.

What We're Looking For

Must Have:

• Strong hands-on experience with Apache Kafka and enterprise messaging/event-streaming platforms.
• Experience building or operating Kafka infrastructure using Confluent Platform, Confluent Cloud, Amazon MSK, or comparable enterprise Kafka environments.
• Strong understanding of Kafka concepts such as brokers, topics, partitions, replication, consumer groups, offsets, lag, availability, and production troubleshooting.
• Experience with Kafka ecosystem technologies such as Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, or Kafka Streams.
• Hands-on Java and Spring Boot development experience.
• Experience designing and developing REST APIs.
• Hands-on production experience with Terraform and Infrastructure as Code.
• Experience with CI/CD, automation, observability, monitoring, and platform reliability.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and event-driven architecture.
• Ability to lead technical initiatives as a senior individual contributor while remaining hands-on.
• Base salary up to $180,000
• Annual individual performance bonus
• Annual company profitability bonus
• 15% employer-funded Master Retirement Account (MRA) contribution