Senior Software Engineer - Kafka

About the role

Gravitee is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to build and maintain the Gravitee Event Gateway, with Kafka as the primary protocol, across the gateway runtime and the event-streaming experience in Gamma. This is a new role that establishes US-hours ownership of Level 3 and Level 4 incidents for the Kafka Gateway and event-native customers, and adds delivery capacity on the Event Stream Management (ESM) roadmap. The role sits within the ESM team based in Europe, with about 80% feature delivery and 20% L3/L4 support and bug fixing.

Key responsibilities

• Design and deliver features end to end, from technical design through implementation, testing, release and iteration.
• Build and maintain features of the Event Gateway with Kafka as the main protocol, across the gateway runtime and the event-streaming experience in Gamma.
• Work with the Kafka wire protocol and ecosystem (MirrorMaker, Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, schema registry, Kafka GitOps tools) and broker semantics such as partitions, replication and consumer groups.
• Implement and support the Kafka security surface: OAuth, PLAIN, SCRAM, SASL, SSL and Kafka ACLs.
• Build observability and alerting for event-driven APIs using JMX metrics, consumer lag tracking and latency budgeting under a proxy hop.
• Apply asynchronous, non-blocking patterns (Netty/Vert.x with backpressure) to performance-sensitive gateway code.
• Own US-hours Level 3 and Level 4 escalations as part of the L3 pager duty rotation.
• Use LLMs and AI-assisted tools thoughtfully, write meaningful automated tests, and collaborate with product managers, designers, engineers and the European ESM team.

Required profile

• 5+ years building and running production backend software on a team that ships and supports its own product, with personally resolved production incidents.
• Strong Java experience (C# accepted if the object-oriented depth is there), with Maven and a reactive, non-blocking stack such as Netty/Vert.x with backpressure.
• Clear understanding of asynchronous systems, event-driven architecture and the Kafka wire protocol and ecosystem.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs or AI coding assistants, and clear communication and collaboration.
• Desired: experience at a streaming vendor or on a Kafka platform team, operating MSK or Confluent Cloud at scale, Docker, Kubernetes, Angular/TypeScript, or open-source developer platforms.

What we offer

• Salary up to $160k depending on experience.
• Medical coverage, pension / 401(k) options and stock options.
• 25 days of holiday plus national holidays, three mental health days and a wellness allowance.
• Professional development budget, hybrid work culture and quarterly team events.