Streaming/Event-Driven Engineer (Kafka Specialist)

Streaming/Event-Driven Engineer (Kafka Specialist) 6-Month contract – Inside IR35 – up to £550 per day London based – hybrid working – 3 days a week on site We are seeking an experienced Streaming / Event-Driven Engineer (Kafka Specialist) to own and evolve our event-driven architecture and real-time data streaming platform. You will be responsible for designing, building and optimising scalable event-driven solutions that enable reliable, high-performance data movement across distributed systems. Working closely with engineering, architecture and platform teams, you will help establish best practices for event modelling, stream processing and system integration within a modern microservices environment. Key Responsibilities • Own the design and implementation of event-driven architecture across the organisation. • Design, build and maintain scalable real-time data pipelines using Kafka technologies. • Develop stream processing applications using Kafka Streams and ksqlDB. • Implement robust event models that support scalable, loosely coupled systems. • Optimise streaming performance, resilience and fault tolerance. • Integrate streaming platforms with cloud-native and microservices-based applications. • Collaborate with software engineers, architects and DevOps teams to deliver high-quality streaming solutions. • Promote engineering best practices around event-driven design, data contracts and messaging patterns. • Monitor, troubleshoot and continuously improve streaming infrastructure and applications. Essential Skills & Experience • Strong commercial experience with: • Confluent Kafka • Kafka Streams • ksqlDB • Proven track record delivering real-time data pipelines and event-driven systems. • Strong understanding of: • Event-driven architecture • Data flow design • Event modelling • System decoupling • Experience integrating streaming platforms within microservices ecosystems. • Strong knowledge of distributed systems, messaging patterns and asynchronous processing. • Experience designing scalable, resilient and highly available streaming solutions. • Excellent problem-solving and communication skills. Desirable Skills • Experience with containerisation technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes. • Knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure or GCP). • Experience with Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD pipelines. • Familiarity with Schema Registry, Kafka Connect and stream governance. • Understanding of observability, monitoring and logging within distributed systems.