Senior Kafka Developer

Humana

Confirmed live yesterday High trust
Hybrid

Quick summary

Work type
Hybrid
Location
KYBoston, MA
Salary
$106,900–$147,000 / yr
Posted
22 days ago
Freshness
Confirmed live yesterday
Closes
Sep 30, 2026

Market check

Salary context

Below market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $174k
This role $127k
$95k most similar roles pay here $222k

This role pays less than 89% of similar roles. Most pay $150,475–$196,712 — the shaded band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $127k versus about $174k for comparable roles.

Based on 240 similar postings.

Employer

About Humana

Humana Inc. is a leading American for-profit health insurance company based in Louisville, Kentucky, specializing in Medicare Advantage plans.

Humana currently has 20 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $129,300–$177,800 across 20 roles with salary data.

Most-posted roles

View all roles at Humana

At a glance

TL;DR · Senior Kafka Developer

Senior Kafka Developer - NBA The Senior Kafka Developer joins the team to build and operate event streaming that connects the Team Caliber business rules engine to the broader decisioning system. This hands-on backend role involves designing and owning Kafka topics, producers, and consumers to move eligibility, suppression, and decisioning events reliably through the platform. The engineer will integrate the Java and Drools rules engine with upstream and downstream systems while ensuring high-throughput, fault-tolerant performance under production load. Key responsibilities include managing partitioning, ordering, idempotency, and dead-letter handling, alongside building Java services that expose APIs. Required skills include expertise in Apache Kafka or Confluent, Java development, distributed systems fundamentals, and cloud infrastructure using Azure, containers, and Kubernetes. The role addresses the technical challenge of processing member PHI within a regulated environment requiring strict security and compliance hygiene.

What you'll do

  • Design and own Kafka producers, consumers, and topic strategies to move data across the platform.
  • Integrate the Java/Drools rules engine with upstream and downstream systems using defined event and API contracts.
  • Engineer for high-throughput reliability including partitioning, ordering, idempotency, and dead-letter handling.
  • Build and maintain Java backend services that produce and consume events while exposing necessary APIs.
  • Profile and tune streaming throughput and latency to ensure the pipeline scales with increasing volume.
  • Instrument streams and services with logging, metrics, and alerting for proactive issue detection.
  • Write tests and perform code reviews while maintaining strict security and compliance standards for PHI data.

What we're looking for

  • Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field.
  • 5+ years of backend software engineering experience with production experience using Apache Kafka or Confluent.
  • Strong Java skills and experience designing event-driven services.
  • Deep understanding of Kafka internals including partitioning, consumer groups, offsets, ordering, and delivery semantics.
  • Solid grasp of distributed systems fundamentals such as idempotency, retries, backpressure, and failure handling.
  • Experience operating services on cloud infrastructure (Azure or equivalent) with containers, Kubernetes, and CI/CD.
  • Preferred experience with the Drools rules engine or other business rules management systems.
  • Familiarity with Kafka Streams, schema registry, and Avro/Protobuf.

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