Position: Kafka Engineer Location: Pittsburgh/Cleveland/Dallas (Hybrid with 3 days onsite) Salary $130k including QPLC We are looking for independent candidate JC _163349 5+ years of experience in software development with at least 3+ years of hands-on Apache Kafka experience • Strong understanding of Kafka architecture (brokers, topics, partitions, offsets, replication, ISR) Experience with Kafka ecosystem tools such as Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Kafka Streams, or ksqlDB • Proficiency in Java, Scala, or Python (Java preferred) Experience designing and supporting high-volume, low-latency data pipelines • Solid understanding of distributed systems, messaging patterns, and event-driven design • Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code practices • Strong debugging, performance tuning, and troubleshooting skills