W2- Senior Kafka SME

Position : Senior Kafka SME

Location: Austin, TX

Onsite: 4 days a week

Contract: 12 months extendable

Relo: yes

Interview process: 2 video interviews to hire

Role Overview

We are seeking a senior Kafka expert who combines deep Confluent Kafka architecture experience, strong cloud and on-premise platform engineering skills, and modern AI-enabled development expertise. The ideal candidate will have a proven track record of automation, operational leadership, and enterprise stakeholder engagement.

This role requires an on-site presence in Austin four days per week.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement secure Kafka architectures, including authentication, authorization, encryption, and network isolation.
• Define and support high availability, disaster recovery, and data replication strategies, ensuring alignment with enterprise standards.
• Advise on data ingestion, event streaming, and batch and stream processing architectures.
• Provide guidance on data modeling and serialization standards such as Avro, Protobuf, and JSON Schema.
• Design and build AI agents and custom frameworks to automate engineering and operational workflows at scale.
• Leverage AI-powered tools like Copilot to accelerate development, automate testing, and improve code quality.
• Drive automation-first operations using Python, Ansible, and scripting, and build self-service operational tools.
• Lead deep-dive investigations into complex production issues, perform root cause analysis, and drive remediation.
• Act as a trusted technical advisor to engineering, operations, and leadership teams.

Required Qualifications

Experience: 10+ years of experience in distributed systems, messaging, and enterprise platform engineering.

Technical Skills:

• Extensive hands-on experience with the Confluent Kafka Platform, both on-premise and in the cloud.
• Proven ability to leverage AI-assisted development (e.g., Copilot, code generation) and build AI-driven agents/workflows.
• Strong background in Linux/Unix environments, networking, OS performance, and security.
• Proven experience with automation, DevOps, and operational tooling (e.g., Azure, Jenkins, Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Python).
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with strong organizational and teamwork abilities.

Preferred Qualifications

• Confluent Kafka and/or Cloud certifications.
• Prior experience supporting large-scale, regulated enterprise environments.

Tarun Gupta 

Senior Technical Recruiter

Virisha LLC

Phone: +1 ext 105

Address: 600 N Broad Street Suite 5 #269, Middletown, DE 19709