Senior Kafka Developer - NBA

Become a part of our caring community The Senior Kafka Developer builds and operates the event streaming that connects Team Caliber — the NBA platform's business rules engine, built in Java and Drools — to the rest of the decisioning system.

You design and own the Kafka topics, producers, and consumers that move eligibility, suppression, and decisioning events through the platform reliably and in order.

This is a hands-on backend role for an engineer who is fluent in event-driven design and enjoys making high-throughput, fault-tolerant streaming systems work correctly under real production load.

Key Responsibilities

Event streaming — Design, build, and own Kafka producers, consumers, and topic strategy that carry rules-engine inputs and outputs across the platform. Rules engine integration — Integrate the Java/Drools rules engine with upstream and downstream systems through well-designed event and API contracts.

Reliability — Engineer for correctness under load: partitioning, ordering, idempotency, exactly-once or effectively-once semantics, retries, and dead-letter handling. Backend services — Build and maintain the Java services around the rules engine that produce and consume events and expose APIs.

Performance and scale — Profile and tune streaming throughput and latency; ensure the pipeline scales as event volume grows. Observability — Instrument streams and services with logging, metrics, and alerting so issues are caught early and diagnosed quickly.

Quality — Write tests, participate in code reviews, and uphold engineering standards; the platform handles member PHI, so security and compliance hygiene are essential.

Use your skills to make an impact Required Qualifications Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related degree 5+ years of backend software engineering, with hands-on production experience building on Apache Kafka/Confluent. Strong Java skills and experience designing event-driven services.

Deep understanding of Kafka internals: partitioning,