Kafka Developer || 7 Year+ || Bangalore || Only Immediate Joiner

Role: Kafka Developer

Experience: 5 Years - 10 Years

Notice Period: Immediate

Location: Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune

Mode: Work from Office - all 5 days.

The Senior Kafka Developer will design, build, test, deploy, and support secure, resilient event-driven applications and integrations for the enterprise Apache Kafka platform described in this SOW. The role will work across Development, QA, UAT, Production, and disaster-recovery environments spanning on-premises RHEL 9, AWS, and Azure, in close coordination with Kafka architecture, platform, security, network, cloud, testing, and application teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain Java and Spring Boot Kafka producers, consumers, and event-driven microservices using approved enterprise engineering standards.
• Design topic, partitioning, message-key, consumer-group, offset-management, retry, dead-letter-topic, idempotency, and delivery-semantics patterns suited to application requirements.
• Build Kafka Streams applications and Kafka Connect integrations for real-time transformation, routing, enrichment, aggregation, and system integration.
• Implement data contracts and schema evolution using Avro, JSON Schema, or Protobuf with the approved schema registry and compatibility controls.
• Integrate applications securely with Kafka using TLS/mTLS, SASL/SCRAM, ACLs, certificates, secrets, keystores, and truststores in accordance with least-privilege standards.
• Support application connectivity across Dallas, Chicago DR, AWS, and Azure, including troubleshooting DNS, routing, firewall, certificate, authentication, latency, and replication-related issues.
• Create automated unit, integration, contract, performance, resilience, failover, and recovery tests; prepare evidence for milestone validation and acceptance.
• Develop deployment and configuration automation using Git, CI/CD pipelines, Terraform, Ansible, and shell scripting as applicable.
• Instrument Kafka applications with structured logging, metrics, tracing, health checks, consumer-lag monitoring, and actionable alerts using approved observability platforms.
• Participate in code reviews, design reviews, defect triage, performance tuning, production-readiness reviews, incident analysis, and root-cause remediation.
• Prepare interface specifications, support guides, deployment procedures, runbooks, test results, and knowledge-transfer materials, and mentor less-experienced developers.

Required Skills & Experience

• Approximately 7+ years of enterprise software-development experience, including 4+ years of hands-on Apache Kafka application development.
• Strong proficiency in Java, Spring Boot, Spring for Apache Kafka, REST APIs, microservices, event-driven architecture, and distributed-system design.
• Deep understanding of Kafka producers and consumers, consumer groups, partitioning, replication, offsets, rebalancing, serialization, transactions, idempotence, and delivery guarantees.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka Streams and Kafka Connect, including connector configuration, transformation logic, error handling, and operational troubleshooting.
• Experience with schema registries, Avro, JSON Schema, or Protobuf, including backward- and forward-compatible schema evolution.
• Working knowledge of Kafka security, including TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, PKI, certificate chains, keystores, truststores, and secrets management.
• Experience with Linux/RHEL, Git, Maven or Gradle, CI/CD, automated testing, monitoring, performance tuning, and production support.
• Strong analytical, documentation, communication, collaboration, and mentoring skills, with the ability to work across onsite and offshore delivery teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience implementing Kafka applications across hybrid environments spanning on-premises infrastructure, AWS, and Azure.
• Exposure to KRaft-based Kafka clusters, MirrorMaker 2, disaster-recovery patterns, and cross-cluster application behavior.
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent observability platforms.
• Knowledge of Kong or other API gateways where Kafka-backed services expose approved HTTP interfaces.
• Knowledge of Confluent Platform or Confluent Cloud, Schema Registry, managed connectors, RBAC, Cluster Linking, ksqlDB, or Flink is an advantage.
• Relevant Kafka, Java, cloud, or DevOps certification is desirable but not mandatory.