Lead Kafka Developer

Job Title: Lead Kafka Developer

Location: Dallas, TX / Cleveland, OH (Hybrid)

Employment Type: Contract

Rate: $48–50/hr

Experience Required: 8+ Years

We are seeking an experienced Lead Kafka Developer with expertise in Apache Kafka, Java, Spring Boot, and Event-Driven Architecture to build and support enterprise-scale real-time messaging and data streaming platforms. This role is ideal for professionals with strong experience designing high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems within Banking or Financial Services environments.

The ideal candidate will provide technical leadership, drive Kafka best practices, mentor development teams, and collaborate with enterprise architects to deliver scalable, cloud-native integration solutions.

Top Required Skills:

• Apache Kafka & Confluent Platform

• Java, Spring Boot & Microservices

• Event-Driven Architecture & Real-Time Data Streaming

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and maintain enterprise-scale event-driven architectures using Apache Kafka.

• Build Kafka producers, consumers, and stream-processing applications using Kafka Streams.

• Develop scalable microservices using Java, Spring Boot, and RESTful APIs.

• Design and implement real-time data integration solutions across enterprise systems.

• Configure and manage Kafka topics, partitions, replication, retention policies, and messaging infrastructure.

• Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize Kafka environments for high availability and performance.

• Collaborate with application, infrastructure, DevOps, and business teams to deliver reliable messaging solutions.

• Implement security, access management, governance, and compliance standards across Kafka platforms.

• Support CI/CD pipelines, automated deployments, and DevOps best practices.

• Participate in architecture reviews, code reviews, production support, and technical design discussions.

• Lead architecture decisions, establish Kafka standards and governance, mentor developers, and drive platform optimization.

• Work closely with business stakeholders to translate requirements into scalable technical solutions.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor''s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

• 8+ years of software development experience.

• 5+ years of hands-on Apache Kafka development experience.

• Strong expertise in Apache Kafka, Kafka Streams, and Confluent Platform.

• Strong programming experience with Java/J2EE and Spring Boot.

• Experience developing RESTful APIs and Microservices.

• Strong understanding of distributed systems, messaging patterns, and event-driven architectures.

• Experience building high-volume, fault-tolerant, low-latency enterprise applications.

• Strong debugging, troubleshooting, and performance tuning skills.

• Experience working with Oracle, SQL Server, or PostgreSQL databases.

• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes/OpenShift, Jenkins, GitHub/GitLab, and CI/CD pipelines.

• Financial Services or Banking domain experience is preferred.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Confluent Kafka Certification.

• Experience with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform cloud platforms.

• Experience with OpenShift or Kubernetes.

• Knowledge of monitoring tools such as Splunk, Prometheus, or Grafana.

• Experience with Banking, Payments, Lending, or Financial Services applications.

• Experience with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Avro, Protobuf, Apache Flink, Spark Streaming, Event Sourcing, or Domain-Driven Design (DDD).

If you are a seasoned Kafka Developer with expertise in enterprise messaging, real-time streaming, and distributed systems, we encourage you to apply with your updated resume.