Staff Engineer - Kafka Specialist
Core
Senior technical leadership role serving as the Kafka subject matter expert and technical authority for Venmo's real-time data and message streaming platform, setting technical direction and driving operational excellence at scale.
Role type
Staff Engineer (Kafka Specialist)
Builds
Venmo's real-time data and message streaming platform
Domain
Fintech / Real-time Data Streaming
Deliverable
production ML models
Required skills
Apache Kafka internals (partitions, replication, ISR, KRaft), multi-region architecture, disaster recovery, IAM-based security, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect/Streams, AWS IaaS/PaaS, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), Python/Java scripting, big data integration (Spark, Glue)
Preferred skills
AWS Solutions Architect certification, Confluent Kafka certification
Technologies
Apache Kafka, AWS (MSK, S3, EKS, Glue, DMS), Terraform, Python, Java, Apache Spark, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams
Responsibilities
Own technical roadmap and architecture for Kafka streaming platform, set design patterns for cluster architecture and governance, lead lifecycle management (upgrades, capacity planning, DR), drive root-cause analysis for complex incidents, define best practices for producer/consumer design, establish engineering standards, mentor engineers, partner with stakeholders on scalable architecture decisions
Seniority
Staff, technical leadership & strategy
