Enterprise Architect - Event-Driven Architecture & Kafka

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We are looking for an experienced Enterprise Architect with deep expertise in event-driven architecture (EDA) and Apache Kafka to join our team. In this role, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, and optimizing our enterprise event-driven systems to enable real-time data processing and integration across the organization. You will lead the creation of scalable, fault-tolerant, and high-throughput data pipelines and advise on best practices for implementing Kafka and related technologies.

Key Responsibilities:

Architecture Design and Strategy

• Develop and implement an enterprise-wide event-driven architecture strategy, utilizing Apache Kafka to support real-time data streaming and integration.

• Design highly scalable and resilient data architectures that align with organizational goals, ensuring that systems are optimized for low-latency and high-throughput use cases.

• Define and enforce EDA standards, protocols, and practices that facilitate reliable communication between services and systems.

Kafka Implementation and Optimization

• Architect, deploy, and manage Kafka clusters and Kafka-based solutions for event streaming and processing across various business domains.

• Design and implement Kafka topics, partitions, and schemas, ensuring optimal throughput and efficient data distribution.

• Drive Kafka performance tuning, including managing retention policies, consumer lag monitoring, and replication configurations to support high availability and fault tolerance.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with application development, data engineering, and DevOps teams to ensure seamless integration and operationalization of Kafka and EDA components.

• Partner with business stakeholders to identify use cases that benefit from event-driven approaches and translate them into architectural requirements.

• Facilitate regular architecture review sessions to align Kafka and EDA implementation with broader enterprise architecture objectives.

Governance and Compliance

• Define data governance and security standards for event data, including access controls, data retention policies, and data encryption for compliance with organizational and regulatory standards.

• Establish monitoring, alerting, and logging practices for Kafka infrastructure to ensure reliability, transparency, and quick incident resolution.

Innovation and Best Practices

• Research and propose new tools, technologies, and methodologies that complement event-driven architectures, such as Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, and other data-streaming frameworks.

• Promote best practices for EDA, including event modeling, message format standardization, and handling of event sourcing and eventual consistency.

• Stay current with the latest developments in EDA, Kafka, and related open-source tools to continually improve the architecture's performance and adaptability.

Required Skills & Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or related career experience

• 8+ years of experience in enterprise architecture, with a focus on distributed systems and event-driven architectures.

• Proven expertise in designing, implementing, and scaling Kafka-based solutions for real-time data processing.

• Advanced knowledge of Apache Kafka, Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, and related ecosystem components.

• Proficiency in designing data streaming architectures, message-driven microservices, and asynchronous communication patterns.

• Strong experience with DevOps practices, including Kafka cluster deployment, mon