Senior Software Engineer – Real-Time Streaming (Kafka, Flink, Spring Boot).

About This Opportunity

CTI Staffing is partnering with a leading transportation organization to find a Senior Software Engineer for real-time streaming systems, hybrid based in Fort Worth, TX.

This team builds and operates real-time data pipelines that support mission-critical operational systems. You'll work on cloud-native streaming services that need to be fast, resilient, and observable, not experimental, but running in production at scale. This is a strong fit for someone who wants to own real Flink and Kafka infrastructure rather than just touch it.

What You'll Do

• Design, develop, test, deploy, and maintain Java-based Apache Flink streaming applications
• Build Kafka event-driven pipelines using topics, partitions, consumer groups, and schema registry
• Develop Spring Boot microservices and REST/GraphQL APIs for downstream integration
• Implement fault-tolerant, observable streaming applications using Flink state, checkpointing, and recovery patterns
• Deploy and monitor services in cloud-native environments using CI/CD, Docker, and Kubernetes
• Participate in architecture discussions, performance tuning, and code reviews
• Collaborate with data engineers, architects, QA, DevOps, and stakeholders to deliver reliable services
• Support production readiness planning and incident troubleshooting

Requirements

What You Bring

Must-Have:

• 7+ years professional Java development, including recent hands-on Java 8+ or Java 11+ work
• 3+ years building production or near-production streaming applications using Apache Flink, Kafka Streams, Spark Streaming, or equivalent
• Hands-on Apache Flink experience with DataStream API, state management, checkpointing, and fault tolerance
• Hands-on Kafka experience with topics, partitions, consumer groups, schema registry, and event-driven architecture
• Production Spring Boot microservices plus REST or GraphQL API development
• Experience deploying to AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, or comparable cloud-native platforms
• Experience with Avro, Protobuf, JSON, schema evolution, or schema registry
• Experience with CI/CD, automated testing, code review, and deployment automation
• Able to work onsite in Fort Worth, TX three days per week (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday) — required, not flexible

Nice-to-Have:

• AWS Managed Service for Apache Flink and AWS MSK
• GraphQL / Apollo GraphQL
• Flink SQL
• Kafka Streams or other stream-processing frameworks
• Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, or equivalent observability tools

Technical Environment:

• Java, Apache Flink, Kafka/MSK, Spring Boot, GraphQL, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD

What Success Looks Like:

• Production Flink jobs running reliably with clean checkpointing and recovery
• Kafka pipelines governed by solid schema management practices
• APIs that downstream teams can integrate against without rework