Senior Confluent Kafka Lead / Python Developer (contract)

Role Overview The Confluent Kafka Lead / Python Developer is responsible for designing, building, and operating enterprise-grade event streaming solutions using Confluent Kafka while developing Python-based producers, consumers, and streaming applications. This role blends deep hands‑on development with technical leadership, ensuring scalable, reliable, and secure real-time data flows across distributed systems. The position plays a key role in event‑driven architecture (EDA), data platform modernization, and real‑time analytics initiatives. Job location: Columbus, OH or Nashville, TN (both locations would be for on‑site work). Key Responsibilities Kafka & Streaming Platform Leadership Lead the design and implementation of enterprise Kafka and Confluent Platform solutions (Kafka, Schema Registry, Connect, ksqlDB). Define and enforce topic design, partitioning, retention, and schema evolution standards. Act as technical owner for Kafka clusters across dev, test, and production environments. Drive best practices for high availability, fault tolerance, and scalability. Python Development (Producers & Consumers) Design and develop Python‑based Kafka producers and consumers using Confluent Kafka Python APIs. Build event‑driven microservices and streaming applications in Python. Implement message serialization and schema validation (Avro, JSON, Protobuf). Handle idempotency, retries, back‑pressure, and error handling patterns. Event‑Driven Architecture & Integration Design event‑driven integration patterns bridging microservices, data stores, APIs, and third‑party systems. Integrate Kafka with downstream consumers such as databases, data lakes, analytics platforms, and search systems. Support real‑time pipelines for transactions, telemetry, customer events, and analytics. Collaborate with API, data, and application teams to align event contracts. Security & Governance Implement Kafka security controls: TLS encryption SASL/OAuth authentication ACL‑based authorization Enforce data governance, schema compatibility rules, and event ownership models. Ensure compliance with enterprise security and regulatory standards. DevOps, Automation & Observability Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for Kafka‑related applications and configurations. Use Infrastructure as Code to provision and manage Kafka infrastructure. Implement monitoring and alerting using tools such as Confluent Control Center, Prometheus, Grafana, or cloud‑native equivalents. Troubleshoot production streaming issues related to latency, lag, throughput, or data loss. Technical Leadership Serve as Kafka subject‑matter expert and technical lead. Mentor developers on event‑driven design and streaming best practices. Review designs and code for Kafka and Python‑based streaming solutions. Partner with architects, SREs, and platform teams on roadmap and capacity planning. Required Qualifications Kafka & Streaming Experience 6–10+ years of experience in software or data engineering. 4+ years of hands‑on experience with Apache Kafka and/or Confluent Platform. Strong knowledge of: Kafka internals (brokers, partitions, offsets, consumer groups) Schema Registry and schema evolution Kafka Connect architectures and connectors Python Development Strong proficiency in Python for backend and streaming development. Experience building production‑grade services using Python frameworks and libraries. Familiarity with async processing, multithreading, or stream processing patterns is a plus. Cloud & DevOps Experience deploying Kafka and applications in cloud or hybrid environments (AWS, Azure, GCP). CI/CD pipeline experience (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab, Azure DevOps). Infrastructure‑as‑Code experience (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM/Bicep). Containerization experience (Docker, Kubernetes) preferred. Preferred Qualifications Experience with ksqlDB, Kafka Streams, or stream processing frameworks (Flink, Spark Streaming). Exposure to event sourcing or CQRS patterns. Integration of Kafka with data lakes, warehouses, and analytics platforms. Confluent or cloud platform certifications. Experience supporting high‑throughput, low‑latency systems. Soft Skills & Leadership Strong communication skills across engineering and stakeholder teams. Ability to translate business use‑cases into event‑driven technical solutions. Comfortable acting as both hands‑on developer and technical lead. Experience influencing architecture and standards across teams. Pay Range & Benefits The pay range that the employer in good faith reasonably expects to pay for this position is $59.79/hour - $93.43/hour. Our benefits include medical, dental, vision and retirement benefits. Applications will be accepted on an ongoing basis. Equal Employment Opportunity Tundra Technical Solutions is among North America’s leading providers of Staffing and Consulting Services. Our success and our clients’ success are built on a foundation of service excellence. We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Unincorporated LA County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: client provided property, including hardware (both of which may include data) entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all portable client computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon completion of the assignment, and; maintain the confidentiality of client proprietary, confidential, or non‑public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected client information technology systems and related data security obligations. #J-18808-Ljbffr