Staff Engineer
Core
Maintaining and contributing to an in-house Apache Kafka distribution, acting as the technical anchor for Kafka internals.
Role type
Staff Engineer (Distributed Systems Infrastructure)
Builds
Internal Apache Kafka distribution, custom patches, and upstream contributions.
Domain
Financial Technology / Distributed Systems Infrastructure
Deliverable
production ML models | infrastructure
Required skills
Deep Kafka codebase familiarity, upstream contribution experience, distributed systems fundamentals, systems-level programming (JVM, OS, Networking), fork/distribution maintenance
Preferred skills
Apache Kafka Committer/PMC status, KRaft experience, KIP authorship, Kafka Streams/Connect internals knowledge, Kafka test infrastructure familiarity
Technologies
Apache Kafka, KRaft, JVM, TCP, ZooKeeper (implied context)
Responsibilities
Own internal Kafka distribution (branching, patching, releases), contribute upstream to Apache Kafka, diagnose and fix deep broker/controller issues, build custom production patches, establish engineering practices, mentor supporting engineers, act as internal authority on Kafka internals, interface with audit/compliance teams
Seniority
Senior, hands-on IC with mentorship responsibilities
