Software Engineer- Kafka

At Quest Global, it’s not just what we do but how and why we do it that makes us different. With over 25 years as an engineering services provider, we believe in the power of doing things differently to make the impossible possible. Our people are driven by the desire to make the world a better place—to make a positive difference that contributes to a brighter future. We bring together technologies and industries, alongside the contributions of diverse individuals who are empowered by an intentional workplace culture, to solve problems better and faster.

Key Responsibilities

Must-Have Skills

Distributed Systems & Architecture

Deep experience designing and building distributed systems in production. Strong understanding of consistency, availability, partition tolerance, and real-world tradeoffs. Proven ability to make architectural decisions that scale with growth and complexity.

Kafka & Messaging Systems

Hands-on experience building and operating Kafka-based systems. Strong understanding of producer and consumer semantics, delivery guarantees, partitioning, and ordering. Ability to design reliable event-driven architectures and troubleshoot production messaging issues.

Cassandra & Data Modeling

Experience designing schemas and operating Cassandra or similar wide-column databases in production. Strong understanding of partition key design, replication strategies, consistency levels, and performance tradeoffs. Ability to guide teams on when and how Cassandra should be used effectively.

Elasticsearch

Experience designing and operating Elasticsearch clusters in production environments. Strong understanding of index design, sharding, replication, and query performance tradeoffs. Ability to guide teams on search use cases, scaling strategies, and avoiding common pitfalls such as cluster overload or mapping explosions.

Relational Databases

Strong experience designing and operating relational databases such as Postgres or MySQL. Ability to model data, design indexes, and reason about transactions, locking, and query performance. Experience scaling relational systems through read replicas, sharding, or architectural changes.

Java Services (Spring Boot)

Extensive experience building production-grade Java services, preferably with Spring Boot. Deep understanding of JVM behavior, concurrency, memory management, garbage collection, and performance characteristics. Strong experience with reactive programming (e.g., Project Reactor, WebFlux) and solid networking fundamentals including TCP/IP, HTTP/2, connection management, timeouts, and backpressure.

Ability to design services that are observable, resilient, and maintainable at scale, with careful attention to threading models, async execution, and network behavior under load.

Nice-to-Have Skills

Reliability-Oriented Design

Strong focus on designing systems that are reliable and resilient by default. Experience building services with clear failure modes, graceful degradation, and strong operational characteristics. Ability to incorporate reliability concerns directly into architecture and code rather than relying on operational fixes.

Kubernetes & Cloud Platforms

Experience building and running services on Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms. Understanding of deployment strategies, resource management, and failure modes in cloud-native environments. Ability to design systems that take advantage of cloud primitives responsibly.

Performance & Scalability

Experience identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks across services, databases, and messaging systems. Strong intuition for capacity planning and saturation limits. Ability to proactively design for growth rather than react to outages.

Observability & Debugging

Strong experience with metrics, logging, and distributed tracing. Ability to debug complex, cross-service issues in production environments. Uses observability data to drive architectural and performance improvements.

We are known for our extraordinary people who make the impossible possible every day. Questians are driven by hunger, humility, and aspiration. We believe that our company culture is the key to our ability to make a true difference in every industry we reach. Our teams regularly invest time and dedicated effort into internal culture work, ensuring that all voices are heard.

We wholeheartedly believe in the diversity of thought that comes with fostering a culture rooted in respect, where everyone belongs, is valued, and feels inspired to share their ideas. We know embracing our unique differences makes us better, and that solving the worlds hardest engineering problems requires diverse ideas, perspectives, and backgrounds. We shine the brightest when we tap into the many dimensions that thrive across over 21,000 difference-makers in our workplace.