Kafka Integration Engineer (80 hours)

Description We are seeking a Kafka Integration Engineer (80 hours work per month) to lead and execute data integration initiatives between our customers’ Kafka streams and internal APIs. This is a hands-on engineering role that requires a strong understanding of real-time data processing, microservices, and cloud-native technologies. You will collaborate closely with customer engineering teams and internal DevOps to build scalable, efficient, and secure data pipelines. Key Responsibilities: - Design, build, and maintain Kafka consumers to ingest and batch-process customer event data. - Implement message parsing and transformation logic (JSON, Avro, Protobuf) to align with Captain Up’s event structure. - Develop and configure provider-specific customer integrations. - Manage secure credentials using AWS Secrets Manager and handle per-application configurations. - Deploy and monitor services in Kubernetes using Helm. - Work with DevOps to troubleshoot deployments, monitor performance, and ensure system reliability. Requirements - Proficient in Node.js and TypeScript. - Strong experience with Apache Kafka and libraries like KafkaJS or similar. - Hands-on experience designing and consuming REST/HTTP APIs for service-to-service integration. - Solid working knowledge of databases (SQL and/or NoSQL) — schema design, queries, and indexing for high-throughput pipelines. - Familiarity with message schemas (Avro, Protobuf) and relevant parsing libraries. - Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Helm, and AWS services, especially Secrets Manager. - Hands-on experience using AI coding assistants (Claude / Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, etc.) to accelerate development, debug, and write production-grade code. - CRITICAL — Customer-facing role: This engineer will work directly with our customers' engineering teams to design, build, troubleshoot, and own integrations end-to-end. Must be confident, professional, and proactive in customer communication (calls, Slack, email, screen-shares). - Excellent spoken and written English (C1+ / fluent). Daily synchronous communication with international customers is required. - Ability to write robust, testable, and maintainable code for high-throughput and low-latency data pipelines. - Excellent debugging, problem-solving, and communication skills. Originally posted on Himalayas