Sr. Open-Source Software Engineer (Kafka)

Job Summary

Required Qualifications

• •A minimum of 12 years of applicable professional software engineering experience is required.
• •Current Apache Kafka committer status with a sustained and publicly verifiable upstream track record across patches, reviews, KIPs, and community standing in Kafka core or a closely related area such as Streams, Connect, clients, or release engineering.
• •Expert Java engineering capability in performance-sensitive, concurrent, and production-grade distributed systems, with the ability to write, review, and reason about complex Kafka internals at depth.
• •Deep mastery of Apache Kafka internals in at least one major domain: broker storage and log replication, KRaft and metadata management, consumer group coordination and rebalancing, protocol and client compatibility, Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, observability, performance, or release management and CI.
• •Demonstrated ability to lead complex technical work through the Apache open source governance model: KIP authoring or co-sponsorship, design consensus, mailing-list engagement, and Jira-driven delivery from proposal through merge.
• •Strong written communication for asynchronous, global, public technical collaboration - mailing lists, design documents, code reviews, and Jira threads.
• •Proven senior-level technical judgment that resolves most blockers independently, determines approach on novel or ambiguous assignments, surfaces systemic risks proactively, and produces work that is consistent with project and team objectives.

Desired Qualifications

• •PMC membership in Apache Kafka or a related Apache project.
• •Track record of work in current Kafka feature and maintenance areas such as KRaft maturity, controller and metadata reliability, consumer rebalance protocol improvements, exactly-once semantics, tiered storage, Kafka Connect security and operability, Streams APIs, client metrics, or release stabili…
• •Experience connecting upstream technical leadership to enterprise customer and operator outcomes - translating production pain points into accepted community improvements.
• •History of mentoring contributors toward reviewer or committer standing in an open governance project.
• •Familiarity with the Kafka ecosystem: Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, MirrorMaker 2, Kafka clients, schema and serialization patterns, Kubernetes-based Kafka operations, or adjacent open source projects such as Strimzi.
• •Education
• •Bachelor's degree in engineering or technical related field of study Or additional equivalent experience.
• •Team Information
• •Leadership and team culture
• •The hiring manager for this role is an Engineering Manager for the Open Source Engineering team. You will join a globally distributed group that values committer-grade technical judgment, clear ownership, transparent community engagement, and practical impact on real customer outcomes.
• •The team culture is high-trust and high-accountability. We support engineers who can go deep technically, mentor others generously, collaborate across product and field functions, and improve both code and the contributor ecosystem around it. You will have significant autonomy paired with close col…