Contract to Hire - Client will not Sponsor - GC/USC only Location - 100% remote - EST hours Sr. Kafka Data Engineer Client is going through a large acquisition and need an extra set of hands to help with the integration. Looking to hire a temp to perm Sr. Kafka Data Engineer - immediately This is a pivotal role—one that sits at the heart of scaling a secure, cloud-native Confluent Kafka Platform. Required Qualifications: • Knowledge and experience typically acquired through the completion of a Bachelor’s degree and 8 plus years of experience • Expert in managing a production Kafka environment. Design, develop, and maintain scalable data pipelines using Confluent Kafka • Expert in automating deployment of infrastructure and platforms using IaC (e.g. Terraform, CloudFormation) and CI/CD (e.g. GitHub Actions) • Demonstrated experience with Python/Java/Scala • will be responsible for developing and managing our data streaming infrastructure, ensuring seamless integration and high performance