Mid-Senior java kafka Developer

We’re seeking a Senior Java/Kafka Developer to join our Data Infrastructure team on site full time 5 days/week. You’ll architect and build scalable, fault-tolerant streaming applications, mentor junior engineers, and own critical components of our real-time data pipeline., * Design & Build: Create production-grade Kafka applications handling millions of messages/second with sub-second latency

• Architecture: Design event-driven microservices and streaming topologies for fault tolerance, scalability, and correctness
• Performance Optimization: Profile, benchmark, and optimize Kafka consumers/producers and Java applications for throughput and latency
• Code Quality: Write maintainable, well-tested code (unit, integration, performance tests); conduct code reviews
• System Design: Participate in architectural decisions for event sourcing, CQRS, real-time aggregations, and stateful processing
• Mentorship: Guide junior developers on best practices for streaming systems and distributed architecture
• Operations: Monitor production systems, troubleshoot issues, implement observability (logging, metrics, tracing)
• Collaboration: Work cross-functionally with platform, infra, and data teams to deliver features

• 7+ years of Java backend development (Spring Boot, Spring Cloud preferred)
• 4+ years of hands-on Kafka experience (producers, consumers, Kafka Streams, or Confluent)
• Strong expertise in:
• Distributed systems, concurrency, and async programming
• Message queue patterns (at-least-once, exactly-once semantics)
• Transactional consistency and eventual consistency tradeoffs
• Database integration (PostgreSQL, MySQL, or NoSQL)
• Testing: Advanced understanding of testing distributed systems (integration, chaos, load testing)
• Problem-solving: Ability to debug complex issues in production systems
• Communication: Clear articulation of technical decisions and tradeoffs

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Kafka Streams or Apache Flink
• Event sourcing / CQRS architecture patterns
• Container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Jaeger)
• Building data platforms or stream processing infrastructure
• Microservices and service mesh experience (Istio)
• Understanding of exactly-once semantics and idempotency patterns
• Open source contributions or public tech writing

Technical Skills

• Languages: Java 11+ (functional programming, reactive patterns)
• Frameworks: Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Spring Kafka, Kafka Streams
• Databases: PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB (experience with each a plus)
• Tools: Maven/Gradle, Git, CI/CD (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions)
• Message Brokers: Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ (experience with multiple a plus)
• Monitoring: ELK Stack, Prometheus, Grafana, or DataDog

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

Our hiring process

• Intro call (30 min) - culture, expectations, and your questions.
• in person interview (60 min) - we talk through a real system design and code-review exercise. No whiteboard algorithms. Out of state travel expense will be at your own expenses.

We aim to reply to every application within 24 hours, and we welcome speculative applications if this role isn’t quite right.

AI Service Corp is an equal-opportunity employer. We evaluate candidates on merit alone and welcome applicants from all backgrounds.

AI Service Corp is a specialist IT consultancy of mid-senior engineers, and automation testers with Java Kafka Developer. We’re building the next generation of high-performance data processing systems. Our platform processes millions of events per second, powering real-time analytics and streaming applications for Fortune 500 companies. If you love solving complex distributed systems challenges with Java and Kafka, we want to hear from you.