Job Title: : Platform Integration Engineer Location: 100% Remote Work BUT MUST BE AVAILABE FOR ONSITE INTERVIEW, AT YOUR OWN EXPENSE IN VIENNA, VA OR PENSACOLA, FL OR SAN DIEGO, CA Duration: Contract, long term expected Requirements: 5+ years supporting enterprise messaging and event-driven platforms. 3+ years hands-on administration experience with Confluent Kafka. Experience managing multi-environment Kafka deployments (Development, QA, Performance, DR, and Production). Knowledge of Kafka cluster sizing, broker management, partition strategy, replication, retention policies, and capacity planning. Experience troubleshooting producer, consumer, broker, and cluster-level issues. Proficiency with Confluent Control Center, Schema Registry, Connect, ksqlDB, and stream processing technologies. Experience implementing high availability, disaster recovery, and multi-cluster replication strategies. Hands-on experience with Kafka security including TLS, MTLS, RBAC, ACLs, encryption, and authentication mechanisms. Strong knowledge of integrating Kafka with Kubernetes/OpenShift, cloud environments, observability tools, and CI/CD pipelines. Understanding of event-driven architecture, data contracts, and enterprise integration patterns. Preferred: Confluent certifications.