# Kafka Technical Lead

**Company**: PayPal
**Location**: San Jose, California
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: $176,500.00 - $262,350.00 Annually
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://paypal.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/jobs/job/San-Jose-California-United-States-of-America/Staff-Engineer---Kafka-Specialist_R0137737?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_1bc6f7e5-8eb

## Description

The Venmo Data Infrastructure team supports Venmo's internal and customer-impacting data movement and message streaming infrastructure. As a senior technical leadership role, you will serve as the Kafka subject matter expert and technical authority for Venmo's real-time data and message streaming platform.

**Responsibilities:**

- Own the technical roadmap and architecture for Venmo's Kafka streaming platform, ensuring it is secure, scalable, reliable, and performant.

- Set the technical direction and design patterns for Kafka cluster architecture, topic design, partitioning strategy, and multi-tenant governance.

- Lead the design and rollout of Kafka lifecycle management, including cluster upgrades, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and multi-region/multi-cluster replication strategies.

- Drive deep root-cause analysis and resolution for complex Kafka performance, reliability, and data-loss incidents.

- Define and evangelize best practices for producer/consumer design, schema governance, and Kafka Connect/Kafka Streams usage.

- Establish and improve engineering standards, runbooks, and operational rigor for streaming infrastructure.

- Mentor and provide technical guidance to senior and junior engineers.

**Requirements:**

- 5+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor's degree.

- Deep, hands-on expertise operating and scaling Apache Kafka in production.

- Proven experience architecting Kafka topologies for multi-region resilience, disaster recovery, and zero/low-downtime upgrades.

- Strong experience securing Kafka with IAM-based authentication/authorization.

- Experience with Schema Registry, schema governance, and Kafka Connect/Kafka Streams patterns.

- Hands-on experience with IaaS and PaaS solutions from AWS.

- Excellent communication skills and ability to explain complex Kafka/streaming trade-offs.

**Benefits:**

- Comprehensive, choice-based programs to support personal wellbeing.

- Generous paid time off, healthcare coverage, and resources to create financial security.

- Flexible, balanced work culture with a holistic approach to benefits.

## Skills

### Required
- Apache Kafka
- AWS
- IaaS
- PaaS
- Terraform
- Python
- Java
- Lambda
- Schema Registry
- Kafka Connect
- Kafka Streams

### Nice to have
- AWS Solutions Architect certification
- Confluent Kafka certification

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