Event Driven Software Engineer

Event Driven SME Software Engineer

Contract: Inside IR35
Location: Sheffield - 2-3 days per week

We're looking for an experienced Event Driven SME Software Engineer to join a greenfield project building a large-scale, high-throughput platform processing billions of cloud telemetry and log events every day.

You'll be hands-on with the design and engineering of event-driven data ingestion and streaming capabilities, helping shape the architecture, engineering standards and testing strategy across the platform.

Key Responsibilities

• Build high-volume, event-driven data ingestion pipelines across multiple Cloud Service Providers.
• Design and engineer streaming solutions using Kafka and Flink, with Java-based services and jobs.
• Deploy and operate cloud-based services with a focus on scalability, resilience, security and observability.
• Contribute to technical architecture covering event schemas, partitioning, ordering, state, replay, retention and failure handling.
• Optimise solutions for performance and cost at significant scale.
• Establish mature automated testing across unit, integration, contract, end-to-end and performance testing.
• Work with cloud-native data collection approaches across AWS, Azure and GCP.
• Contribute to CI/CD, infrastructure automation and operational best practices.

Essential Experience

• Proven experience delivering large-scale event-driven systems in production.
• Strong hands-on Kafka experience, including partitioning, consumer groups, ordering, schema evolution, retention and replay.
• Strong hands-on Flink or equivalent stream-processing experience, including stateful processing, checkpoints, back-pressure and delivery semantics.
• Excellent software engineering skills, with strong knowledge of clean code, design patterns, microservices, TDD/BDD and performance engineering.
• Strong cloud engineering experience, ideally AWS.
• Demonstrable experience building robust automated testing strategies and driving a quality-first engineering culture.
• Strong understanding of scalability, performance, bottlenecks and cost optimisation at high volumes.

Desirable

• Multi-cloud telemetry/log collection experience across AWS, Azure and GCP.
• Terraform and Infrastructure as Code.
• Strong CI/CD and automated deployment experience.
• Experience contributing to cloud/application architecture while remaining hands-on technically.
• Observability and SRE practices.

This is a genuinely hands-on SME role for someone who can make architectural decisions, write production-quality code and build platforms that are scalable, resilient, testable and cost-effective.