Senior Event-Driven Developer 6 month contract Birmingham, AL (Remote) No H1B and CPT Client Cross This is going to be a Senior Event-Driven Developer. Need someone who has extensive experience in IBM Event Stream, Kafka and Apache.This is fully remote but the client would prefer candidates to be in EST, CST or MST as they had a hard time scheduling meetings with PST candidates. Client will be based on Birmingham, AL so work schedule will most probably be CST. Position Overview We are seeking a seasoned Senior Event-Driven Developer to lead the design, implementation, and optimization of our real-time data streaming platform. In this role, you will develop robust streaming pipelines, ensure high-throughput and low-latency data delivery, and migrate/integrate legacy systems into a modern event-driven architecture. The ideal candidate is a core Apache Kafka expert with deep, hands-on experience utilizing IBM Event Streams (IBM's enterprise-grade Kafka distribution) to build scalable, secure, and resilient enterprise solutions.

Key Responsibilities

Development " Design & Build: Develop and maintain high-performance, distributed event-driven applications and microservices using Apache Kafka and IBM Event Streams. " Schema Management: Implement and enforce data governance using Avro, JSON Schema, or Protobuf via the IBM Event Streams Schema Registry. " Stream Processing: Build real-time stream processing applications using Kafka Streams, KSQL, or IBM Event Processing. Platform Optimization & Security " Tuning & Performance: Optimize Kafka cluster configurations, topic topologies, partition strategies, and producer/consumer configurations for maximum throughput and minimal latency. " Enterprise Security: Configure and maintain enterprise-grade security protocols within IBM Event Streams, including SASL/SCRAM, TLS encryption, and IAM/Acl policies. " Reliability: Implement robust error-handling patterns, dead-letter queues (DLQ), and disaster recovery/mirroring strategies (e.g., MirrorMaker 2). Collaboration " CI/CD Integration: Collaborate with DevOps to automate the deployment of Kafka artifacts (topics, schemas, connectors) using GitOps and CI/CD pipelines. Required Technical Skills & Qualifications Core Streaming- Deep expertise in Apache Kafka (Producers, Consumers, Broker internals, Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams). IBM Ecosystem - Proven experience deploying and managing IBM Event Streams (on-prem, Cloud Pak for Integration, or IBM Cloud). Programming - Strong proficiency in Java, Scala, Go, or Python (Java/JVM preferred for Kafka ecosystem). Data & Serialization - Experience with Avro, JSON, and managing enterprise Schema Registries. Infrastructure Familiarity with Kubernetes / Red Hat OpenShift (since IBM Event Streams frequently runs on OpenShift via operators). Experience - 5+ years in backend software development, with 3+ years dedicated to Kafka/Event-Driven architectures.