Mid-Senior Java Kafka Developer

AI Service Corp is hiring a Mid-Senior Java Kafka Developer to join the Data Infrastructure team. This on-site role in Windsor Mill, MD focuses on building scalable, fault-tolerant real-time streaming applications and Kafka-based microservices that support production workloads.

Role Overview

You will design and implement event-driven systems using Java and Kafka, with an emphasis on performance, correctness, and maintainable engineering practices. The position includes contributing to architecture decisions and ensuring production reliability through monitoring and observability.

Responsibilities

• Develop production-grade Kafka applications capable of handling millions of messages per second with sub-second latency
• Design event-driven microservices and streaming topologies with fault tolerance, scalability, and correctness
• Profile, benchmark, and optimize Kafka producers and consumers, along with Java application performance for throughput and latency
• Produce maintainable, well-tested code using unit, integration, and performance tests; participate in code reviews
• Contribute to architectural decisions related to event sourcing, CQRS, real-time aggregations, and stateful processing
• Support junior developers by sharing best practices for streaming systems and distributed architecture
• Operate production systems by monitoring, troubleshooting issues, and implementing observability through logging, metrics, and tracing
• Collaborate cross-functionally with platform, infra, and data teams to deliver features

Required Skills and Experience

• 7+ years of Java backend development experience (Spring Boot and Spring Cloud preferred)
• 4+ years of hands-on Kafka experience, including producers, consumers, Kafka Streams, or Confluent
• Strong expertise in distributed systems, concurrency, and asynchronous programming
• Strong knowledge of message queue patterns, including at-least-once and exactly-once semantics
• Strong understanding of transactional consistency and the tradeoffs of eventual consistency
• Strong experience integrating databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or NoSQL systems
• Advanced testing knowledge for distributed systems, including integration, chaos, and load testing
• Ability to debug complex issues in production environments
• Clear communication of technical decisions and tradeoffs

Technology Stack

Key technologies include Java, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Kafka, Kafka Streams, Confluent, PostgreSQL, MySQL, NoSQL, Maven, Gradle, Git, CI/CD, Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, RabbitMQ, ELK Stack, Prometheus, Grafana, DataDog, Redis, MongoDB, Docker, Kubernetes, Apache Flink, Istio, Spring Security, Spring Kafka, Spring Data JPA, REST, TypeScript, Angular, RxJS, NgRx, SCSS, Azure, AWS, JUnit 5, Testcontainers, Playwright, and Spring Boot 3 with Java 11+ (Java 17/21 also noted in the stack keywords).

Compensation

Salary: USD 100,000 - 200,000 per year, based on experience.

Location and Work Arrangement

• Location: Windsor Mill, MD
• On-site schedule: 5 days/week
• Employment type: Full-time

Clearance

Background check on public trust.

Experience Level

Senior role (6+ years).

Hiring Process

• Intro call (30 min): discussion of culture, expectations, and your questions.
• In-person interview (60 min): system design discussion and a code-review exercise. No whiteboard algorithms. Out-of-state travel expenses are your responsibility.

What We Offer

Competitive salary: $100k - $200k (based on experience).