Senior Software Engineer - Confluent Kafka

About Product Team

A software engineer on this team primarily contributes by implementing and deploying the business logic inside some KORA components that run in production. Their code defines how the system behaves, how features are delivered, and how the platform responds under real customer workloads.

KORA is the cloud native kafka engine. More about KORA

About the Role

We are a team of passionate engineers who love solving complex distributed systems and infrastructure problems. We are building Kora from the ground up to be a true managed service for clients who demand high levels of availability and performance at the lowest cost of ownership. In this role, you will be working on building highly available, reliable, secure, scalable, and multi-tenant Kora's compute layer. You will be instrumental in driving the technical solutions end-to-end, working closely with the team and key stakeholders to design, architect, and develop top-notch solutions. Here are examples of some of the challenges we've taken on in recent years:

What Youll Do

As an L3 Senior Software Engineer, you are a mostly self-sufficient team member who owns and drives well-scoped to moderately complex problems end-to-end in your product area and helps other engineers with specific tasks when needed. In this role you will:

• Design, implement, and maintain services that power catalog, publishing, distribution, and lifecycle management for connectors and other Kafka/Flink artifacts, within a well-defined portion of the Marketplace Hub domain.
• Deliver large features independently and with high quality, including tests, logging, and error handling, contributing to bigger initiatives owned by the team.
• Build a solid understanding of the design and architecture of your product area (e.g., specific Marketplace/Hub services, data models, and APIs) and use that to make sound design and implementation choices.
• Participate actively in technical processes for your team: design/one-pager reviews, RFC/KIP discussions where relevant, and PR reviews, providing constructive feedback to peers.
• Improve performance, scalability, reliability, and security of Marketplace Hub services through incremental changes: refactors, dependency upgrades, schema evolution, and automation of existing manual workflows.
• Take shared ownership of operational excellence by handling on-call responsibilities, following runbooks, performing production operations safely, and contributing to better monitoring, alerting, and incident remediation.
• Collaborate with engineers across teams (Kafka Connect, Partner Engineering, Security, Billing, UX) on well-scoped cross-team efforts, unblocking yourself and others as needed.
• Help maintain a high engineering bar on the team through good coding practices, thoughtful reviews, and reliable delivery on commitments.

What You Will Do

• Driven and excited about challenges of delivering complex projects in production with a focus on quality
• Customer focused - making customers more successful by taking on their most challenging problems motivates you
• Have a strong sense of teamwork and able to make decisions which benefit the team and company
• Identify root causes, and get beyond treating symptoms - motivated to dig deep and solve hard problems