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Apache Kafka Experts for Hire – 17 Selected

apache kafka experts - Apache Kafka Experts for Hire – 17 Selected

Apache Kafka’s growth is driven by a community of talented engineers, thought leaders, and influencers who contribute code, build companies, and share knowledge.

Below is a curated list of the best Kafka experts worldwide – including open-source committers, hands-on startup founders, prolific bloggers, and key engineers at companies using or developing Kafka.

  1. Gwen Shapira
  2. Rajini Sivaram
  3. Guozhang Wang
  4. Ismael Juma
  5. Matthias J. Sax
  6. Viktor Gamov
  7. Konstantine Karantasis
  8. Colin McCabe
  9. Robin Moffatt
  10. Randall Hauch
  11. Stéphane Maarek
  12. Bill Bejeck
  13. Alexander Gallego
  14. Ewen Cheslack-Postava
  15. A. Sophie Blee-Goldman
  16. Magnus Edenhill
  17. Kai Waehner

Now, let’s delve deeper into their remarkable contributions and impact on the Kafka ecosystem.

Gwen Shapira

YouTube Video

Nationality: Israeli

Gwen is a veteran Kafka expert and was an early engineer at Confluent who helped customers succeed with Kafka. She is an Apache Kafka committer and PMC member, well known for co-authoring “Kafka: The Definitive Guide” (O’Reilly).

With 15+ years of experience in data architecture, Gwen contributed code and knowledge to improve Kafka’s integration with ecosystems (she worked on Kafka Connect and client tuning). She has a knack for explaining Kafka’s complex concepts – as evidenced by her frequent talks at industry conferences and her instructional courses on Kafka (she created a popular Kafka fundamentals course on O’Reilly Media). After serving as a system architect at Confluent, Gwen co-founded Nile (a startup offering managed Postgres for SaaS apps), but she remains a prominent voice in the Kafka community. Her blog posts and presentations continue to guide engineers on Kafka best practices and architecture.

Rajini Sivaram

Nationality: British

Rajini is a Principal Engineer at Confluent and an Apache Kafka committer/PMC member renowned for her work on Kafka security and geo-replication features. She has been contributing to Kafka since around 2016 and co-authored the second edition of “Kafka: The Definitive Guide,” focusing on security aspects.

At Confluent, Rajini designs and develops features like encryption, authentication (OAuth, SASL), and ACL improvements, as well as multi-region replication capabilities for both open-source Kafka and Confluent Platform. Her notable contributions include implementing Kafka’s authorizer interfaces and security plugins, and driving the Cluster Linking feature for cross-datacenter mirroring. Rajini is often seen sharing her knowledge – she’s spoken at Kafka Summit and ApacheCon on topics like “Kafka Security 101” and “Locking Down Kafka” for enterprise deployments.

Guozhang Wang

Guozhang Wang - Apache Kafka Experts for Hire – 17 Selected

Nationality: Chinese

Guozhang is a senior engineer at Confluent and a pioneering contributor to Apache Kafka’s stream processing capabilities. As an Apache Kafka committer and PMC member, Guozhang played a key role in creating the Kafka Streams API and continues to lead its development.

He joined Confluent after working with Kafka at LinkedIn and brought a research background (PhD from Cornell) to implement streaming semantics in Kafka. Guozhang has since driven many of Kafka Streams’ advanced features (such as standby tasks and state optimizations) and co-authored influential papers on stream processing. Known as the “Kafka Streams pioneer”, he frequently speaks at Kafka Summit and on Confluent’s podcast about stream processing design. Guozhang’s expertise in distributed systems and mentoring of new contributors have been instrumental in expanding Kafka’s use for real-time analytics.

Ismael Juma

Nationality: British

Ismael is a senior engineer and Apache Kafka committer who has long been at the forefront of Kafka’s development. As an engineering leader at Confluent, he focuses on Kafka’s core – working on critical features like KRaft and infinite storage in Confluent Cloud.

Ismael has contributed extensively to Kafka’s performance optimizations and led several release cycles. Prior to Confluent, he was an Apache Cassandra committer, and he brought that distributed systems expertise into Kafka. Known for his attention to detail, Ismael has authored many improvements in Kafka’s replication and client protocol. He’s also active in the community: answering questions on mailing lists, speaking at events like Current conference (2023) about Kafka’s future. Ismael’s work behind the scenes has been pivotal in making Kafka more stable, scalable, and cloud-ready.

Matthias J. Sax

Nationality: German

Matthias J. Sax is a software engineer at Confluent and one of the key committers driving Apache Kafka’s stream processing evolution. He is an Apache Kafka PMC member whose primary focus is Kafka Streams and its integration with ksqlDB.

Matthias has contributed to Kafka since 2015, co-authoring major features like the Streams Processor API and windowing semantics. He conducts the Kafka Streams maintenance with a blend of academic rigor and practical engineering. Matthias often presents at Kafka Summit and writes deep-dive articles about stream processing internals. He’s known for tackling complex issues like stream temporal joins and exactly-once semantics in Streams, making those concepts accessible through talks and blogs. As a mentor, Matthias also guides new contributors in Kafka’s community, ensuring the project’s stream API remains robust and user-friendly.

Viktor Gamov

Viktor Gamov - Apache Kafka Experts for Hire – 17 Selected

Nationality: Ukrainian-American

Viktor is a globally recognized developer advocate and Kafka expert who spent years at Confluent educating and inspiring the Kafka community. As a Principal Developer Advocate, Viktor helped thousands of developers adopt Kafka by creating demo applications, speaking at conferences worldwide, and co-authoring the book “Kafka in Action.”

He has deep knowledge in building streaming applications (leveraging Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, etc.) and is known for his engaging live coding sessions. Viktor’s expertise in distributed systems and humorous style have made him a sought-after speaker at events like JavaOne, Devoxx, and Kafka Summit. He also co-hosts the DevRelRad.io podcast and actively writes about event streaming on his personal blog. Even after moving to Kong (API platform), Viktor continues to be a Kafka influencer – often comparing Kafka patterns with other technologies and staying involved in the community.

Konstantine Karantasis

Nationality: Greek

Konstantine is a software engineer and Apache Kafka committer who has made significant contributions to Kafka’s Connect API and client ecosystem. During his time at Confluent, Konstantine was a main contributor to Kafka and led development of Kafka Connect’s evolution – he authored widely used connectors and implemented features such as incremental cooperative rebalancing for Kafka Connect.

He also improved Connect’s plugin isolation and exactly-once delivery capabilities. Konstantine is known in the community for diving deep into Kafka improvement proposals (KIPs) – for example, he contributed to exactly-once semantics in core Kafka and to client-side enhancements in AdminClient and Producers. He has written technical blogs and spoken at Kafka Summit about Connect’s internals and how to achieve truly fault-tolerant pipelines. In recent years, Konstantine joined Microsoft’s Azure team, applying his Kafka expertise to cloud services. He remains active on the Apache Kafka project, reviewing KIPs and mentoring new contributors. His work ensures Kafka Connect and clients keep pace as Kafka core evolves, making him a linchpin between Kafka’s core and its extensibility.

Colin McCabe

Nationality: American

Colin McCabe is a veteran Kafka committer and PMC member who has been instrumental in Kafka’s scalability and performance improvements. Now a Principal Engineer at Confluent, Colin “works to improve the performance, scalability, and general awesomeness of Apache Kafka.”

He has contributed code across the board: from the Kafka storage layer to the new KRaft controller. Colin also brought experience from the Apache Hadoop project which he applied to Kafka’s file management and network layers. He is one of the co-authors of the famous KIP-500 design and has implemented large parts of it in Kafka 2.8+. Colin often acts as release manager for Kafka releases. Within the community, he is respected for thoughtful code reviews and detailed design discussions on the mailing list. His HackerOne appearances and InfoQ interviews about Kafka’s future show his commitment to transparency. Overall, Colin is a behind-the-scenes powerhouse ensuring Kafka continues to evolve for cloud-scale deployments.

Robin Moffatt

Robin Moffatt - Apache Kafka Experts for Hire – 17 Selected

Nationality: British

Robin Moffatt is a long-time Kafka evangelist and practitioner, known for his prolific blogging and community contributions. Formerly a Developer Advocate at Confluent, Robin recently joined Decodable (Flink stream processing startup) as a Principal DevEx Engineer.

He has been speaking and writing about Apache Kafka since 2015, covering everything from Kafka Connect integrations to ksqlDB use cases. Robin’s personal blog is a treasure trove of Kafka tips, recipes, and “gotchas” that have helped many engineers in the field. He’s also an active community moderator on Stack Overflow and Reddit. In addition, Robin has served on Kafka Summit program committees, ensuring quality content for Kafka conferences. Whether it’s via his “Trainspotting with Kafka” demos or his Twitter presence, Robin is always sharing practical knowledge. His emphasis on making Kafka accessible and fun has made him one of the most approachable Kafka experts in the world.

Randall Hauch

Nationality: American

Randall Hauch is an open-source veteran who has significantly influenced Kafka’s ecosystem through his work on Kafka Connect and change data capture. He was an early engineer at Confluent, where he worked on Kafka and Kafka Connect, and later founded the Debezium project (an open-source CDC platform built on Kafka).

Randall developed Apache Kafka’s first open-source monitoring tool, Burrow, to track consumer lag. He also co-authored “Kafka: The Definitive Guide,” lending his expertise in Kafka’s internals and operations. At Red Hat, he led Debezium’s development to capture database changes into Kafka in real time. This project has grown under his guidance into a popular component of modern data architectures. Randall’s contributions span coding, writing, and evangelism: he has spoken at numerous conferences about data integration, and he regularly shares insights on LinkedIn and in blog posts about Kafka’s design patterns. Currently at MongoDB, Randall continues to work on Kafka connectors and remains an active community voice.

Stéphane Maarek

Stephane Maarek - Apache Kafka Experts for Hire – 17 Selected

Nationality: French

Stéphane Maarek is a leading Kafka instructor and influencer who has taught Apache Kafka to tens of thousands of students online. He is the CEO of DataCumulus and a best-selling Udemy instructor, known for his comprehensive Kafka courses that cover basics to advanced scenarios.

Stéphane started as a solutions architect and began creating Kafka tutorials around 2017, realizing the demand for hands-on learning resources. He has since produced multiple courses and is often cited as the go-to trainer for Kafka newbies. Stéphane also co-hosts a YouTube channel and appears on podcasts to discuss Kafka use cases and cloud integrations. While he may not contribute code to Kafka, his impact on the community is huge: he makes Kafka accessible to a broad audience of developers. Many Kafka professionals credit Stéphane’s courses for jump-starting their Kafka journey. He continues to update his content and engages with the community through Q&A forums and social media.

Bill Bejeck

Nationality: American

Bill Bejeck is a Kafka Streams contributor and Developer Advocate at Confluent, best known as the author of “Kafka Streams in Action.” He is an Apache Kafka committer and has focused on making Kafka Streams more accessible to developers.

Bill has contributed code to Kafka’s Streams library and actively educates users through examples and talks. With 15+ years in software engineering, he distills complex streaming concepts into practical guides – his book and its second edition (2022) cover building real-time microservices with Kafka Streams. At Confluent, Bill often writes blog posts and appears in community meetups to demonstrate Streams features like interactive queries and the Processor API. He is also involved in Kafka Streams’ API design discussions, helping to refine features such as topology optimizations and new DSL operators. Bill’s approachable teaching style has helped many developers get started with Kafka Streams.

Alexander Gallego

Alexander Gallego - Apache Kafka Experts for Hire – 17 Selected

Nationality: American

Alexander Gallego is the founder and CEO of Redpanda (formerly Vectorized), a company building a modern streaming platform that is API-compatible with Kafka. A highly skilled C++ systems engineer, Alex has deep knowledge of Kafka’s internals – so much that he set out to create an alternative from scratch to address Kafka’s performance bottlenecks.

Redpanda, founded in 2019, operates as a drop-in replacement for Kafka, offering lower latencies and simpler operations while preserving Kafka’s APIs. Alex remains hands-on with engineering; in Redpanda’s early days he spent months coding the core engine himself. He frequently discusses Kafka’s design trade-offs in interviews and conference talks, explaining where Redpanda diverges to improve upon them. Before Redpanda, Alex built a distributed stream processing engine at Akamai and knows the streaming space end-to-end. His contributions influence the Kafka ecosystem by driving innovation and healthy competition in stream processing technology. Under Alex’s leadership, Redpanda has open-sourced parts of their code and shares lessons on operating at Kafka-scale.

Ewen Cheslack-Postava

Nationality: American

Ewen Cheslack-Postava is an original author of Kafka Connect and a former engineer at Confluent who significantly shaped Kafka’s integration ecosystem. As an early Kafka committer, Ewen created the Kafka Connect framework to stream data between Kafka and external systems at scale.

He led development of many core Connect features and helped build Confluent’s connector ecosystem. Ewen’s work enabled Kafka to become a central hub in data architectures by simplifying integration. After Confluent, he continued to champion open source: he co-founded a company and remained active in Kafka’s community discussions. Ewen is known for his articulate talks – he has spoken at ApacheCon and Kafka Summit about data integration patterns and pitfalls. He also co-hosted early episodes of Confluent’s podcast, explaining Kafka and Connect for practitioners. With his blend of deep technical skill and ability to communicate, Ewen has been a mentor to many Apache Kafka contributors. His creation, Kafka Connect, remains one of Kafka’s most important sub-projects, widely used for building real-time pipelines.

A. Sophie Blee-Goldman

A. Sophie Blee Goldman - Apache Kafka Experts for Hire – 17 Selected

Nationality: American

Anna “Sophie” Blee-Goldman is a rising star in the Kafka community, known for being one of the top contributors to Kafka Streams in recent years. As a software engineer at Confluent (until 2023), Sophie worked on Kafka’s core Streams engine, tackling complex problems like state store restoration and standby replicas.

Her contributions earned her committer and PMC status on Apache Kafka – a notable achievement, as she’s among the youngest members on the Kafka PMC. In 2024, Sophie became a founding engineer at Responsive, a startup focused on simplifying Kafka Streams for organizations. There, she’s building a managed cloud-native Kafka Streams service, leveraging her deep expertise in stream processing. Sophie is also an excellent communicator: she has spoken at Kafka Summit London 2024 about custom state stores and has hosted Kafka Streams 101 courses on Confluent’s YouTube.

Magnus Edenhill

I wrote librdkafka to make Kafka truly cross-platform — because data doesn’t live only in the JVM.

Nationality: Swedish

Magnus Edenhill is the original author of librdkafka, the widely used C/C++ Kafka client library, and now a software engineer at Confluent leading Kafka client development. Magnus created librdkafka in 2012, enabling Kafka integration from languages like C, Go, Python, and .NET via the C library.

His work was so impactful that Confluent acquired his company (Edenhill) and hired Magnus to continue advancing Kafka clients. Under his guidance, librdkafka achieved a 1.0 release with full support for Kafka’s latest features. He has also built Confluent’s Kafka client for Go and contributed to Kafka protocol improvements to better support non-Java clients. Magnus remains deeply engaged with the open-source community, often answering questions on GitHub and maintaining a robust test suite for librdkafka. He’s known as Kafka’s “polyglot enabler” – ensuring that Kafka’s power is accessible beyond the JVM. His commitment to performance and stability has made it the de facto Kafka client for numerous platforms. Magnus also shares his experiences through blog posts and podcast interviews, discussing lessons learned from maintaining a popular open-source library for Kafka over a decade.

Kai Waehner

Kafka is not just a messaging system – it’s a central nervous system for real-time data, connecting everything from edge devices to AI models.

Nationality: German

Kai Waehner is the Global Field CTO at Confluent and one of the most prominent Kafka evangelists for IoT, machine learning, and enterprise use cases. With a background in integration architecture, Kai specializes in showing how Kafka can be used beyond traditional messaging – in areas like connected cars, Industry 4.0, and real-time analytics.

He has authored dozens of technical articles and whitepapers on his blog exploring Kafka’s role in event-driven microservices, data streaming for AI, and bridging MQTT/edge devices with Kafka. Kai is a fixture at international tech conferences: he delivers keynotes and sessions that often include live demos of Kafka integrations. As Field CTO, he also spends time with Fortune 500 companies, guiding them on their streaming platform strategies. Kai’s expertise spans multiple domains, making him a versatile advocate for Kafka’s broad applicability. He is also active online, sharing slides and insights on LinkedIn and Twitter, and is frequently cited for his thought leadership in streaming architectures.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.

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