Kafka Data Engineer Jobs

US data engineer openings whose parsed job description names Apache Kafka. About 640 active listings, concentrated in streaming and event-driven architecture roles. MSK (managed Kafka on AWS), Confluent Cloud, Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, and KSQL show up as supporting tags. Schema Registry and Avro or Protobuf are implicit on most postings even when not named explicitly.

Kafka Data Engineer Jobs

US data engineer listings that name Apache Kafka in the posting, scored against your profile with salary and layoff signals.

Frequently asked questions

How many Apache Kafka data engineer jobs are listed at once?

Around 640 active listings name Kafka in the parsed JD. The set concentrates in streaming, event-driven architecture, and real-time analytics roles. Kafka-tagged roles often pair with Spark Streaming, Flink (about 180 listings), or Beam for the processing layer.

What Kafka-specific topics come up in these data engineer interviews?

Five recur. Partition design and what determines parallelism (consumer count caps at partition count). Exactly-once semantics in Kafka Streams and where the at-least-once vs exactly-once boundary actually lives. Consumer group rebalancing and the static-membership escape hatch. Schema Registry compatibility modes (BACKWARD, FORWARD, FULL) and breakage patterns. Tiered storage in modern Kafka (3.6+) and what changes operationally.

Do I need Kafka Streams or KSQL specifically, or is Spark Streaming enough?

Depends on the company. About 40 percent of Kafka-tagged listings expect Kafka Streams or KSQL for in-stream processing; 35 percent run Spark Streaming or Structured Streaming on top of Kafka; the rest use Flink, Beam, or a custom consumer. If your background is Spark, target Spark Streaming-on-Kafka roles; if you have Kafka Streams or KSQL experience, expand into the dedicated Kafka-engineering roles at Confluent, Stripe, Airbnb, and similar.

What's the typical Kafka stack for the data engineer jobs in this catalog?

Three common shapes. AWS native: MSK plus Kafka Connect plus Schema Registry on Glue plus consumers in MSK or Lambda. Confluent Cloud: Confluent plus ksqlDB plus Confluent Schema Registry plus connectors to Snowflake or S3. Self-managed: open-source Kafka plus custom Java or Scala consumers plus Avro plus a self-hosted Schema Registry. The self-managed shape declines as MSK and Confluent Cloud absorb the operations burden.

Are Kafka data engineer salaries above the catalog average?

Materially. Streaming-shaped DE roles pay 10 to 25 percent above the comparable batch-shaped DE roles at the same seniority, because the talent pool is smaller and the system-design surface is harder to fake. Senior Kafka-shaped DE roles typically cluster in the $200K to $280K base range with equity adding 40 to 100 percent on top.

What does a streaming-focused data engineer interview loop look like?

Usually one Kafka system-design round (build a deduplicating consumer at X events per second with these failure modes). One SQL or coding round (often SparkSQL or PySpark against a Kafka source). One past-projects deep dive that drills into how you handled backpressure, schema evolution, and operator state. Behavioral plus hiring-manager rounds round out the loop.

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