Kafka Integration Engineer (80 hours)

We are seeking a Kafka Integration Engineer (80 hours work per month) to lead and execute data integration initiatives between our customers’ Kafka streams and internal APIs. This is a hands-on engineering role that requires a strong understanding of real-time data processing, microservices, and cloud-native technologies. You will collaborate closely with customer engineering teams and internal DevOps to build scalable, efficient, and secure data pipelines.
Key Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and maintain Kafka consumers to ingest and batch-process customer event data.
• Implement message parsing and transformation logic (JSON, Avro, Protobuf) to align with Captain Up’s event structure.
• Develop and configure provider-specific customer integrations.
• Manage secure credentials using AWS Secrets Manager and handle per-application configurations.
• Deploy and monitor services in Kubernetes using Helm.
• Work with DevOps to troubleshoot deployments, monitor performance, and ensure system reliability.

• Proficient in Node.js and TypeScript.
• Strong experience with Apache Kafka and libraries like KafkaJS or similar.
• Hands-on experience designing and consuming REST/HTTP APIs for service-to-service integration.
• Solid working knowledge of databases (SQL and/or NoSQL) — schema design, queries, and indexing for high-throughput pipelines.
• Familiarity with message schemas (Avro, Protobuf) and relevant parsing libraries.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Helm, and AWS services, especially Secrets Manager.
• Hands-on experience using AI coding assistants (Claude / Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, etc.) to accelerate development, debug, and write production-grade code.
• CRITICAL — Customer-facing role: This engineer will work directly with our customers' engineering teams to design, build, troubleshoot, and own integrations end-to-end. Must be confident, professional, and proactive in customer communication (calls, Slack, email, screen-shares).
• Excellent spoken and written English (C1+ / fluent). Daily synchronous communication with international customers is required.
• Ability to write robust, testable, and maintainable code for high-throughput and low-latency data pipelines.
• Excellent debugging, problem-solving, and communication skills.