Kafka Integration Architect

Job Title: Kafka Integration Architect

Location: King of Prussia, PA

Employment Type: Contract
Experience Required: 12+ Years

Job Summary

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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

Key Responsibilities

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.

Education Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field.

Keywords

Apache Kafka, Kafka Architect, Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, ksqlDB, Schema Registry, Event Driven Architecture, EDA, CQRS, Event Sourcing, Confluent Kafka, Amazon MSK, Aiven, Avro, Protobuf, JSON Schema, Microservices, Real-Time Streaming, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Distributed Systems, Integration Architecture.