Senior Java Platform Engineer/Kafka Manager

About the Company:

🌎 Akvelon is a USA-based software engineering and consulting company with offices across the USA, Poland, Ukraine, Serbia, and Mexico. We are an official vendor of Google and Microsoft and partner with Fortune 500 clients and global technology leaders.

At Akvelon, engineers work on large-scale cloud, AI, distributed systems, and enterprise platform projects used by millions of users worldwide.

Project Description:

We are hiring Senior Engineers for a strategic enterprise cloud data infrastructure project focused on expanding and improving the Managed Kafka Connect ecosystem.

The team is responsible for accelerating onboarding and productionization of first-party Kafka connectors for a large-scale managed streaming platform. Engineers will work on high-scale distributed data infrastructure, connector reliability, cloud integrations, CDC systems, and operational readiness.

Planned connectors include:

• Apache Iceberg Sink
• Debezium MySQL Source
• Debezium MongoDB Source
• SQL Server CDC Source
• Spanner CDC Source
• BigTable Sink
• BigQuery Sink improvements

The project includes:

• OSS connector integration
• Performance optimization
• Cloud authentication integration
• Reliability engineering
• Load testing
• Production readiness
• Kafka Connect ecosystem improvements

This engagement offers the opportunity to work on enterprise-scale distributed systems and modern cloud data infrastructure used by global technology platforms.

Work from the office Poland, Krakow

Responsibilities:

• Integrate and productionize Kafka Connect connectors
• Improve performance, scalability, and reliability of distributed data systems
• Optimize JVM applications and troubleshoot bottlenecks/OOM issues
• Work with Kafka Connect internals and connector lifecycle
• Implement cloud authentication and networking integrations
• Participate in operational readiness activities:
  • Load testing
  • Probers
  • Playbooks
  • Launch reviews
• Collaborate with distributed engineering teams
• Contribute to backend services written in Java and partially Go

Requirements:

Must Have:

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience
• Strong Java / JVM expertise
• Experience with performance tuning and troubleshooting
• Strong understanding of distributed systems
• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect
• Experience debugging production infrastructure issues
• Experience with build systems and dependency management
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (preferably GCP)
• Upper-Intermediate+ English

Nice to Have:

• Apache Iceberg experience
• Debezium experience
• CDC systems knowledge
• Go backend development experience
• Kubernetes knowledge
• SRE / operational readiness background
• OSS contribution experience
• Experience with large-scale platform engineering

Working Conditions and Benefits:

• Paid vacation and sick leave
• Official state holidays — 9-11 public holidays per year
• Professional growth through challenging projects and the opportunity to master new technologies
• Flexible working schedule: 8 hours per day, 40 hours per week
• Personal Career Development Plan (CDP)
• Employee support programs (discounts, healthcare, legal assistance)
• Paid external training, conferences, and professional certifications aligned with business goals
• Internal workshops, seminars, and English classes
• Corporate library with paper and e-books

This position is not open to U.S.-based applicants.

Ready to work on distributed systems? Apply now and join our team.