Description

REQUIRED
Distributed Systems & Event-Driven Architecture
- Solid understanding of event-driven architecture: producers, consumers, topics, partitions, consumer groups, at-least-once vs exactly-once delivery
- Experience with Kafka or equivalent durable, ordered, replayable event log (Pulsar, Kinesis) -- including compacted topics and consumer-group offsets
- Familiarity with choreography vs orchestration trade-offs; understands when each applies
- Experience with the transactional outbox pattern or at-minimum dual-write awareness
Event Sourcing & Domain Patterns
- Practical experience with event sourcing -- fold-over-stream to derive current state, append-only stores, replaying events for consistency
- Understands the aggregate pattern and how it acts as a write-side consistency boundary
- CQRS -- able to separate the write model (aggregate) from the read model (projection) and explain why
- Awareness of optimistic concurrency (version checks on append) and how it prevents stale or out-of-order writes
- Exposure to saga pattern -- at minimum compensating transactions for irreversible commits (payment, policy issuance)
API & Interface Design
- Designs clean, stable REST/HTTP APIs versioned with OpenAPI/JSON Schema
- Understands CloudEvents envelope conventions (or equivalent event envelope standards)
- Comfortable writing and debugging JSONata or similar transform DSLs (JOLT, jq) for boundary mapping
Languages & Runtimes (Polyglot Environment)
- Proficient in at least one of: Java (17+), Kotlin, Go, TypeScript/Node.js
- Comfortable reading and contributing to codebases in at least two languages
- Understands the difference between a compiled, statically typed runtime and a dynamic one -- and when each fits
Persistence & Data
- Experience with a relational database for structured, queryable domain state (PostgreSQL preferred), Along with No-SQL Databases
- Understands indexing, transactions, and write-side vs read-side data model separation
- Exposure to object/blob storage for document artefacts
Infrastructure & Deployment
- Comfortable deploying services on Kubernetes -- writing manifests, understanding pod lifecycle, config maps/secrets, readiness probes
- Experience with Docker and multi-stage container builds
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or equivalent)
- Basic Infrastructure as Code awareness (Terraform or Helm)
Testing
- Writes meaningful unit tests and integration tests -- including tests that exercise the event backbone (not just mocks)
- Experience with contract testing (Pact or schema-based) at event boundaries
- Able to generate and reason about end-to-end scenario coverage for a multi-component flow
Security Baseline
- Understands OAuth 2.0 / OIDC token flows -- how a token is validated at an API gateway
- Aware of zero-trust principles -- does not assume network position means trust
- Handles PII and PHI with correct masking, exclusion from logs, and tagging --not as an afterthought

NICE TO HAVE
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- Experience integrating with LLMs or AI agents via API (OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, or equivalent) -- prompt construction, structured output, tool-calling
- Familiarity with JSON-LD or linked-data concepts (self-describing,
machine-readable documents)
- Experience building or consuming NATS JetStream for low-latency real-time messaging alongside Kafka
- Knowledge of insurance domain concepts -- quote, bind, issue, endorsement, premium, policy lifecycle -- or any other complex financial/regulated product lifecycle
- Experience with JSONata specifically (not just awareness of transform DSLs)
- Contribution to or design of a shared runtime library used by multiple services
- OpenTelemetry instrumentation experience -- custom spans, exemplars, PII scrubbing at the collector

Key Skills

Education

Bachelor's degree