Kafka Integration Architect

Architecture & Design

• Define and own the enterprise event streaming architecture using Apache Kafka and related technologies.
• Design highly scalable, resilient, and fault-tolerant streaming platforms.
• Establish standards for topic design, partitioning, retention policies, and consumer group strategies.
• Evaluate and recommend Kafka deployment models including self-managed Kafka, Confluent Platform, Amazon MSK, and Aiven.

Integration

• Architect end-to-end integrations between Kafka and enterprise applications.
• Design and govern Kafka Connect source and sink connector implementations.
• Define enterprise schema management and data governance standards.
• Enable microservices integration through event-driven architectures.

Governance & Standards

• Establish Kafka governance frameworks and operational standards.
• Define SLAs for message delivery, throughput, latency, availability, and durability.
• Implement security controls, access management, and compliance requirements.
• Drive observability, monitoring, alerting, and tracing standards across the Kafka ecosystem.

Leadership & Collaboration

• Serve as the primary Kafka architecture subject matter expert.
• Conduct architecture reviews and approve Kafka-related solution designs.
• Mentor developers, architects, and platform engineers.
• Partner with platform, security, infrastructure, and data engineering teams to ensure successful platform adoption.

We are seeking a highly experienced Kafka Integration Architect to lead the design, implementation, governance, and optimization of enterprise event streaming platforms. The ideal candidate will possess deep expertise in Apache Kafka, event-driven architectures, real-time data integration, and distributed systems. This role will drive architecture decisions, establish governance standards, and provide technical leadership across enterprise integration initiatives.

Top 5 Must-Have Skills

1. Apache Kafka Architecture & Design

• Extensive experience designing and implementing enterprise-scale Kafka solutions.
• Expertise with Apache Kafka, Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, ksqlDB, and Schema Registry.
• Ability to define scalable, fault-tolerant, and highly available event streaming architectures.

2. Event-Driven Architecture & Integration

• Strong experience designing integrations between Kafka and enterprise systems including databases, REST APIs, cloud platforms, legacy applications, and microservices.
• Deep understanding of Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), CQRS, and Event Sourcing patterns.

3. Kafka Governance & Best Practices

• Experience establishing Kafka governance frameworks, topic lifecycle management, naming conventions, security standards, and access controls (ACLs/RBAC).
• Expertise in partitioning strategies, retention policies, consumer group management, and schema governance.

4. Schema Management & Data Streaming

• Hands-on experience with Schema Registry and schema evolution using Avro, Protobuf, and JSON Schema.
• Experience designing and managing Kafka Connect source and sink connectors.

5. Leadership & Technical Architecture

• Proven experience leading architecture reviews, mentoring engineering teams, and driving enterprise-wide Kafka adoption.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with Confluent Platform, Amazon MSK, Aiven, or other managed Kafka services.
• Cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.
• Observability and monitoring tools including Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, and OpenTelemetry.
• Experience supporting large-scale real-time analytics and streaming data platforms.
• Experience within Financial Services, Healthcare, Telecommunications, Retail, or other high-volume transaction environments., * Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field.