BGSF has joined with a Maryland client in search of a Kafka Technical Lead. The position is On-site in Woodlawn, MD (5 days/week) and the right candidate must be able to obtain and maintain a Public Trust

Position Overview:

We’re seeking a Kafka Technical Lead to guide a team of Kafka developers and admins in building scalable, event-driven solutions using Confluent Kafka. You'll lead architecture efforts, define best practices, and work with internal and client teams to expand Kafka adoption across the agency.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead Kafka team and facilitate weekly technical reviews
• Architect and implement event-based data platforms using Kafka
• Define streaming strategies for integration with microservices and data warehouses
• Establish Kafka best practices, standards, and mentor team members
• Resolve platform issues and collaborate across business and technical teams
• Translate complex technical topics for leadership and stakeholders

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree + 12 years of experience (or equivalent)
• 7+ years of Kafka experience (Confluent/Apache)
• 2+ years designing and deploying to AWS
• 1+ year of technical leadership

Technical Skills:

• Hands-on expertise with Confluent Kafka, Kafka Connect, KStreams, and KSQL
• Deep understanding of Kafka architecture, security, scaling, and performance
• Experience with event-driven and microservices architecture
• Kafka on OpenShift/Kubernetes, high availability & SLA strategies
• Strong experience with AWS (ECS, EKS, RDS, S3, Flink)
• Familiarity with relational DBs (PostgreSQL, Oracle), Avro, JSON, data compression

Bonus Skills (Preferred):

• Domain Driven Design (DDD), disaster recovery
• CI/CD, DevOps, Ansible, Terraform
• Spring Boot, Java EE, unit testing (JUnit, Mockito), TDD/BDD
• Kafka monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana
• AWS Certifications

For consideration please send your resume to jdavis@bgsf.com

BGSF is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to providing equal opportunities for employment to all qualified people, regardless of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, disability status, veteran status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.