Software Engineer - Kafka

Apple's Kafka organization develops messaging systems that are reliable, scalable, and performant. The team maintains Apple-scale deployments while contributing to Kafka internals, brokers, client libraries, replication, fault tolerance, partitioning, and system optimizations. As a leader, you will manage, mentor, and grow engineers responsible for both internal platform needs and upstream open-source contributions. You will oversee technical execution, maintain engineering standards, and ensure operational excellence across the Kafka ecosystem.

• Experience in software development, with strong experience in distributed systems or messaging platforms at scale.
• Proven experience delivering complex, large-scale infrastructure or platform components.
• Proficiency in Java, Scala, or other languages used in Kafka development.
• Strong understanding of algorithms, data structures, fault tolerance, and performance for large-scale messaging systems.
• Hands-on experience designing, building, and operating systems using Apache Kafka, * Solid understanding of Kafka broker internals, including replication, partitioning, and client interaction.
• Familiarity with distributed systems concepts such as consensus, consistency models, and fault tolerance.
• Experience with multi-datacenter deployments, load balancing, quota management, or tenant isolation.
• Experience with testing methodologies such as fault injection, performance benchmarking, or property-based testing.
• Proven ability to maintain strong operational standards, including monitoring, incident response, and remediation.
• Experience contributing to or working with open-source projects, ideally Apache Kafka or related ecosystems.
• Hands-on experience with distributed system design and debugging at scale.
• Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.