Backend / Platform Developer Consultant (Temporal & Kubernetes)

Qualifications:

Strong working knowledge of Java and the JVM ecosystem (Spring Boot or similar)

Experience with additional backend languages (Go, Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, C#, etc.)

Hands-on experience with a durable execution / workflow engine - Temporal preferred (Apache Airflow, Prefect, or similar also relevant) - including modeling workflows and activities, handling retries and timeouts, and reasoning about idempotency and failure modes

Experience designing and operating Kafka-based event streaming systems: topic and partition design, consumer groups, schema management, and reasoning about ordering, delivery guarantees, and consumer lag

Experience designing and building GraphQL APIs (GraphQL Federation) - schema design, resolvers, and performance concerns (N+1, caching, pagination)

Deep, hands-on AWS experience: architecting, deploying, and operating production systems (EKS, networking, IAM, messaging, and data services)

Solid Kubernetes experience: deploying, operating, and debugging production workloads

A systems engineering mindset: understanding of complex scaling issues, concurrency, backpressure, caching strategies, and failure modes across distributed systems

Experience planning and executing migrations - application replatforming, workflow engine migrations, data/schema migrations, or moving workloads between environments with minimal downtime

A thorough understanding of CI/CD pipelines and GitOps-style delivery

Experience with observability in practice - logging, metrics, and tracing (OpenTelemetry a plus)

Experience building modern microservice-based or serverless applications

Database schema design and development expertise

Responsibilities:

Build durable systems. Design and implement Java services, Temporal workflows, and Kafka-based event pipelines, and help clients adopt durable execution and event streaming the right way - from first workflow to production scale.

Lead modernization efforts. Plan and execute large-scale modernization efforts - moving workflows, services, and data between platforms, clusters, and clouds - with safety, observability, and minimal disruption as first-class requirements.

Own the platform. Build and operate Kubernetes-native infrastructure and CI/CD on AWS so application teams can ship safely and quickly. Treat reliability, observability, and repeatability as part of the deliverable, not an afterthought.

Consult and manage. Consult with clients to build outcome-driven applications and platforms, guiding them through the process, identifying potential problems and unknowns, and tackling challenges.

Travel. This is a remote, full-time position that requires the ability to travel. We travel an average of 3–5 days every quarter, and we'll always do our best to work with your schedule.

Teach. We'll discuss opportunities for you to present at conferences, attend and give training, plan and run meetups or local groups, and create various kinds of content in your expertise.

Will be a plus:

Deep Temporal experience in production - self-hosted on Kubernetes and/or Temporal Cloud; workflow versioning and patching, safe deployments, long-running workflow migrations; worker deployment and tuning (pollers, task queues, concurrency/slot configuration); namespace management, mTLS (SPIFFE/SPIRE or private CA), capacity/scaling (e.g. APS/TRU on Temporal Cloud)

Deep Kafka experience in production - MSK, Confluent, or self-managed on Kubernetes; Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, schema registry workflows (Avro/Protobuf); migrating between clusters or providers; integrating Kafka with downstream analytical stores; familiarity with large-dataset processing approaches such as Lambda and Kappa architectures

Experience building or operating an internal developer platform (IDP) with self-service, paved-path infrastructure

GitOps delivery with ArgoCD or Flux

Infrastructure as code - Terraform/OpenTofu, and provisioning AWS resources via Crossplane, ACK, or similar

Writing Kubernetes controllers/operators (controller-runtime, kubebuilder) and working with CRDs

Helm chart authoring and distribution (including OCI/registry-based)

Secrets management (e.g. External Secrets Operator), autoscaling (Karpenter, KEDA), and service mesh concepts (Istio, SPIFFE/SPIRE)

Additional queueing and messaging technologies (AWS SQS/SNS, RabbitMQ)

API design across REST and gRPC alongside GraphQL

AuthN/AuthZ concepts (sessions, API tokens, JWTs)

Automated testing across the stack (unit, integration, performance/benchmarking)

Benefits & Social Package

Competitive salary and annual bonus opportunity

Completely remote work with flexible hours

401(k) matching

4 weeks of paid time off in addition to 8 paid holidays

Health, dental, and vision insurance offerings

Paid maternity and paternity leave

STD, LTD, and Life Insurance coverage