Confluent Kafka & Flink Infrastructure Engineer

Being good neighbors – helping people, investing in our communities, and making the world a better place – is who we are at State Farm. It is at the core of how we operate and the reason for our success. Come join a #1 team and do some good!

Help build and operate the Event Hub platform that enables event-driven capabilities across the enterprise. In this role, you will own the underlying Confluent Kafka and Apache Flink infrastructure, ensuring it is production-grade, highly available, scalable, and resilient, with robust disaster recovery.

Key Responsibilities

• Provision, configure, and manage Confluent Kafka (brokers, topics/partitions, ACLs, schema registry) and enforce platform governance standards (retention, quotas, security).
• Operate Apache Flink infrastructure (job/task managers, checkpointing, state backend) and support runtime availability and performance.
• Design and maintain high availability (AZ/region) and disaster recovery plans, including failover testing and runbooks.
• Use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and automation to deliver reproducible, auditable infrastructure and support infrastructure CI/CD.
• Own observability and security for Kafka/Flink (monitoring/alerting/runbooks, encryption, IAM/VPC/network isolation, certificate and access management).
• Partner with software teams to align standards, support onboarding, and document architecture and operational procedures.

Qualifications

• Hands-on production experience administering Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform (cluster administration, security, topic management, performance tuning).
• Experience operating Apache Flink (or similar streaming frameworks) at the infrastructure level (checkpointing and state management).
• Strong IaC experience and AWS familiarity (e.g., MSK/EC2/EKS, IAM, VPC, CloudWatch, S3).
• Proven experience with HA/DR and reliability practices (SLA/SLO ownership, incident response, root-cause analysis).
• Knowledge of security and networking patterns for distributed systems.
• Experience integrating infrastructure changes into CI/CD with safe deployment and rollback.
• Nice to Have
• Experience with Confluent Cloud, container orchestration (e.g., EKS/ROSA), OpenTelemetry/distributed tracing, or GitOps.
• Exposure to infrastructure considerations for agentic/AI-driven workloads.

SFARM

PM22

Because work-life balance is a priority at State Farm, compensation is based on our standard 38:45-hour work week!

• Potential starting salary range: $95,800.00 - $140,000.00
• Starting salary will be based on skills, background, and experience
• High end of the range limited to applicants with significant relevant experience
• Potential yearly incentive pay up to 18% of base salary

Work Arrangements:

Hybrid Work Locations: Bloomington, IL-Corporate, Dunwoody, GA-Park Center, Richardson, TX-CityLine or Tempe, AZ-Marina Heights Hub locations.

• Hybrid Work arrangement: A "Hybrid" position means selected candidates will be assigned to a facility and will spend some time working both in the office and from their home. Work arrangements could change over time based on business need.

SPONSORSHIP: Applicants for this position are required to be eligible to lawfully work in the U.S. immediately; employer will not sponsor applicants for U.S. work authorization (e.g. H-1B visa) for this opportunity.

At State Farm, we offer more than just a paycheck. Check out our suite of benefits designed to give you the flexibility you need to take care of you and your family!

• Get Paid! On top of our competitive pay, you are eligible for an annual raise and bonus.
• Stay Well! Focus on you and your family’s health with our robust health and wellbeing programs. State Farm pays most of your healthcare premium, and we offer multiple healthcare plan options, including a high deductible plan. All medical plans provide 100% coverage for in-network preventative care, AND you and your family have access to vision, dental, telemedicine, 24/7 mental health professionals, and much more!
• Develop and Grow! Take advantage of educational benefits like industry leading training programs, top-notch tuition assistance programs, employee resource groups, and mentoring.
• Plan Ahead! Plan for those big moments in life with benefits like fertility/IVF/adoption assistance, college coaching, national discount programs, interactive monthly financial workshops, free financial coaching, and more. You can also start a savings