Company Description
With over 7,000 experts in 20 countries, Talan is a global consulting and technology group dedicated to accelerating our clients’ transformation through technology, data, and innovation. We’re proud to be a Certified Great Place to Work and are on track to reach €1 billion in revenue by 2025.
At Talan, our philosophy is simple yet powerful: Positive Innovation—leveraging technology to benefit people and society.
Join us and be part of meaningful change!
Job Description
Location: Chicago, IL (Hybrid – at least 4 days onsite/week)
Visa Sponsorship: We offer sponsorship under specific treaty-based U.S. work visas, including TN and E-2 (for eligible Canadian, Mexican, and French citizens). We do not support or transfer other visa types (e.g., H-1B).
We are seeking a Senior Java & Kafka Engineer with experience in cloud technologies. You will play a key role in developing and evolving our data lake platform and event streaming solutions.

REQUIRED TECHNICAL SKILLS:

• Strong Java skills with 6+ years of experience, including Spring Boot
• Proven experience leading Kafka design, deployment, and performance tuning is mandatory
• Strong Kafka internals and troubleshooting skills
• Big Data tools: Spark, Hive, Avro, Parquet
• Kubernetes and container orchestration
• Elastic Search, Kibana, Logstash
• Cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or similar)
• Agile methodologies and automated testing (TDD, BDD)

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE

• BS/master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or relevant technical field.
• 5-10 years of experience working as Senior Programmer Analyst role
• Possess the first-hand experience working in a real Change and Release management environment
• Experience with business analysis methodologies, processes, and documentation standards

• Design, develop, and implement technical solutions in cloud environments using Java, Spark, Hive, Avro, Parquet, Kubernetes, Spring Boot, Elastic Search, Logstash, Kibana, Oozie, and PostgreSQL.
• Lead the design, implementation, and performance optimization of Kafka-based event streaming architectures, ensuring scalability, reliability, and high availability.
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and tune Kafka clusters to maintain optimal system performance.
• Collaborate with Product Owners to break down customer requirements into actionable user stories.
• Deliver clean, tested, and maintainable code that meets acceptance criteria and Definition of Done.
• Manage deployment, CI/CD pipeline monitoring, and production stability activities.
• Engage in pair programming and write unit and BDD-style tests with JUnit, Mockito, and Cucumber.
• Participate actively in backlog refinement, sprint planning, and agile ceremonies.