Lead Kafka Developer

System One invites a Lead Kafka Developer to join onsite in Pittsburgh, PA on a contract engagement. The role focuses on designing, building, and operating Kafka based streaming architectures, while guiding engineering teams through complex production challenges. The company emphasizes a collaborative, engineering-first culture and offers robust benefits and a 401(k) plan to support long-term career growth in high-throughput data systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop Kafka based streaming architectures and data pipelines
• Manage Kafka cluster setup, configuration, tuning, monitoring, and upgrades
• Define standards for topic design, schema management, security, and reliability
• Collaborate with platform, application, and data engineering teams
• Troubleshoot complex production issues and perform root cause analysis
• Provide technical leadership, mentoring, and code reviews for developers
• Support enterprise event driven solutions and scalable messaging systems

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent experience
• Strong enterprise Kafka engineering experience
• Experience operating Kafka in production environments
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, event driven architecture, Kafka operations, and high throughput data streaming solutions
• Proficiency with Apache Kafka (Producers, Consumers, Streams, Connectors)
• Kafka Production Support & Administration
• Java and/or Scala (Python is a plus)
• Distributed Systems & Messaging Architectures
• Event Driven Architecture
• Kafka Monitoring & Performance Optimization
• Schema Registry Experience
• Soft Skills: Excellent verbal and written communication, strong leadership and collaboration abilities, problem solving and troubleshooting expertise, ability to mentor and guide engineering teams

Technologies

• Apache Kafka
• Kafka Producers
• Kafka Consumers
• Kafka Streams
• Kafka Connectors
• Schema Registry
• Java
• Scala
• Python

Location

Pittsburgh, PA onsite

Benefits

• Health and welfare benefits coverage options including medical, dental, vision, spending accounts, life insurance, voluntary plans
• Participation in a 401(k) plan