Kafka Data Pipeline Engineer (Remote Contract)

I’m helping Century 21 Accent Homes find a top candidate to join their team full-time for the role of Kafka + Data Pipeline Engineer (Remote / Contract).

This is a cool job because you’ll get to build advanced messaging systems with Kafka & AI tech for a legacy-driven real estate leader since 1973.

Compensation:
USD 2.8K - 4K/month.

Location:
Remote (anywhere).

Mission of Century 21 Accent Homes:
“We are pro-actively promoting the interests of our clients through real estate target marketing, honest evaluation of property values, and open communications.”

What makes you a strong candidate:
- You are proficient in KsqlDB, Node.js and Python.
- English - Conversational.

Responsibilities and more:

Responsibilities:
- Design and implement Kafka topics for processing communication data from Gmail, LeadSimple, and other sources.
- Build a middleware API to:
- Trigger on incoming Gmail messages.
- Enrich messages using LeadSimple’s API.
(Optionally) perform Rent Manager lookups for property metadata.
- Filter out spam and irrelevant messages using logic such as sender whitelisting or LeadSimple contact validation.
- Maintain a conversation_context table using Tableflow or ksqlDB for enriched thread metadata.
- Ensure messages are properly routed to Kafka (communication-events) with clean, AI-ready JSON.
- Collaborate with internal teams to define message schemas, enrichment fields, and downstream AI use cases.
- Set up lightweight monitoring and logging for errors and failed enrichments.
- Advise on infrastructure best practices (e.g., using Redis for caching, managing Pub/Sub backpressure, etc.).

Requirements
- Proven experience working with Kafka (Confluent Cloud or self-hosted).
- Hands-on experience with:
- Kafka Streams or ksqlDB.
- REST API integrations (especially Gmail API and/or CRMs like LeadSimple).
- Proficiency in Python, Node.js, or similar backend languages.
- Familiarity with event-driven architecture and streaming design patterns.
- Experience with at least one cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
- Solid understanding of asynchronous job handling, retry logic, and webhook workflows.
- Ability to structure clean, enriched JSON events for AI, analytics, and automation.
- Excellent communication skills to clearly explain technical concepts to ops-minded teams.

Nice-to-Have:
- Experience with OpenAI API, LangChain, or vector databases like Pinecone or Chroma.
- Experience building agent-style tools (like Slack bots or AI copilots).
- Prior exposure to property management systems or service scheduling tools.
- Experience with Tableflow or other streaming-state tools.