Role: Senior Event-Driven Architecture Engineer (Kafka & Java)
Duration: Long Term Contract
Location: New York, NY/Charlotte, NC (Hybrid, Onsite 3 Days/Week)
Role Overview:
We are seeking a highly experienced and hands-on Event-Driven Architecture Engineer to design and build scalable, resilient, real-time event-driven platforms supporting mission-critical business capabilities. This role requires deep expertise in Apache Kafka, Java-based distributed systems, microservices architecture, event sourcing, and cloud-native engineering. The successful candidate will be responsible for driving the design, implementation, and operational excellence of an enterprise event platform capable of supporting high-volume transaction processing, workflow orchestration, and real-time analytics. You will work closely with Architecture, Product, Data Engineering, and Platform teams to establish enterprise standards for event-driven design and develop a reusable foundation for future business services.
Key Responsibilities:
Event Platform Architecture
- Design and implement enterprise-scale event-driven architectures using Apache Kafka.
- Define topic hierarchy, partitioning strategy, retention policies, schema governance, and consumer patterns.
- Drive architecture decisions related to throughput, latency, resiliency, scalability, and operational supportability.
- Establish event contracts, canonical message models, and enterprise integration standards.
- Design multi-region event distribution strategies including replication, failover, replay, and disaster recovery capabilities.
- Define patterns for event sourcing, CQRS, saga orchestration, and distributed transaction management.
Software Engineering
- Design and develop highly scalable Java/Spring Boot microservices.
- Build reusable frameworks and libraries for event publishing, consumption, schema validation, observability, and resiliency.
- Develop workflow orchestration capabilities for complex business processes and lifecycle event management.
- Implement asynchronous processing patterns leveraging Kafka Streams, stream processing technologies, and event-driven workflows.
- Build APIs and integration services supporting modern event-driven ecosystems.
Platform Engineering
- Define and implement cloud-native deployment architectures.
- Establish Kubernetes deployment standards and containerization best practices.
- Develop Infrastructure-as-Code solutions using Terraform, CloudFormation, or equivalent technologies.
- Design CI/CD pipelines supporting automated testing, deployment, and observability.
- Partner with platform teams to ensure secure, resilient, and compliant deployments.
Reliability & Observability
- Design monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting frameworks.
- Implement operational dashboards and real-time visibility into event processing pipelines.
- Define standards for:
- Idempotency
- Retry mechanisms
- Dead-letter processing
- Error recovery
- Message replay
- Event versioning
- Lead root cause analysis and platform performance optimization efforts.
Technical Leadership
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship to development teams.
- Conduct architecture and code reviews.
- Define engineering standards and best practices for event-driven systems.
- Collaborate with enterprise architects, data architects, and product teams to ensure consistent adoption of platform standards.
- Act as a subject matter expert for Kafka and distributed systems across the organization.
Required Qualifications:
Experience
- 10+ years of software engineering experience.
- 5+ years designing and implementing event-driven architectures.
- 5+ years of hands-on Apache Kafka experience in large-scale production environments.
- Proven experience designing distributed systems supporting mission-critical workloads.
- Experience leading engineering teams or acting as a technical lead on major initiatives.
Technical Skills:
Core Technologies
- Expert-level Java
- Spring Boot
- Spring Kafka
- Apache Kafka
- Kafka Connect
- Kafka Streams
- REST APIs
- Microservices architecture
Distributed Systems
- Event-Driven Architecture (EDA)
- Event Sourcing
- CQRS
- Saga Pattern
- Message-driven systems
- Asynchronous processing
- High-availability architecture
- Disaster recovery design
Cloud & DevOps
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- Terraform
- CI/CD pipelines
- GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, or equivalent
Observability
- OpenTelemetry
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- ELK/Splunk
- Distributed tracing platforms
Data & Messaging
- Avro
- Protobuf
- Schema Registry
- JSON
- CDC patterns
- Debezium
- Data streaming and integration platforms
Databases
- PostgreSQL
- Oracle
- MongoDB
- Cassandra
- Redis
- Databricks
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience in Capital Markets, Trading, Investment Banking, or Financial Services.
- Experience designing trade lifecycle event models and workflow orchestration platforms.
- Knowledge of Common Domain Model (CDM) concepts.
- Experience supporting multi-region and globally distributed systems.
- Familiarity with streaming technologies such as Apache Flink or Spark Streaming.
- Experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP cloud environments.
- Knowledge of regulatory, resiliency, and operational risk requirements within financial institutions.