Title: Eventing / Messaging / Cloud-Native Integration Engineer Location: Primarily Remote; Chicagoland Candidates Preferred Position Type: 6-Month Contract with Possible Extension Overview Looking for an Eventing / Messaging / Cloud-Native Integration Engineer to support our client's cloud modernization and acquisition-integration efforts. This senior-level consultant will assess asynchronous processing, messaging, streaming, serverless, and cloud-native managed-service dependencies that may materially affect application onboarding to a target cloud platform. The engineer will analyse representative producers, consumers, queues, topics, streams, event triggers, retry behaviour, dead-letter handling, ordering, replay, fanout, idempotency, and failure scenarios. This person will determine whether existing dependencies can be retained through a controlled exception, bridged to a target service, replaced with an equivalent architecture, or require deeper application refactoring. What You Bring to the Role. (Ideal Experience)
- Senior-level experience with distributed systems, event-driven architecture, messaging platforms, and cloud-native integrations.
- Strong experience with technologies such as:
- Amazon SQS
- Amazon SNS
- Amazon Kinesis
- RabbitMQ
- Apache Kafka
- Amazon MSK
- AWS Lambda
- Lambda event source mappings
- Experience with HTTP-based integrations, asynchronous APIs, and event-driven integration patterns.
- Familiarity with serverless and bring-your-own-application deployment models.
- Deep knowledge of:
- At-most-once, at-least-once, and effectively-once delivery patterns
- Topic and partition design
- Routing and fanout
- Consumer groups
- Message ordering
- Deduplication
- Visibility timeouts
- Acknowledgment models
- Retries and backoff strategies
- Dead-letter queues
- Event replay
- Idempotency
- Schema evolution
- Backpressure
- Event-trigger behavior
- Strong understanding of operational observability for event-driven and asynchronous systems.
- Ability to identify differences between a straightforward technology substitution and a change to application behavior or processing semantics.
- Experience assessing platform, security, networking, deployment, and operational dependencies.
- Ability to estimate producer, consumer, application, platform, security, testing, and support effort for multiple migration approaches.
- Strong written communication skills with the ability to document complex architectural findings clearly and concisely.
What You'll Do. (Skills Used in this Position)
- Assess messaging, streaming, serverless, asynchronous processing, and managed-service dependencies.
- Analyze representative:
- Producers and consumers
- Queues and topics
- Streams and partitions
- Event triggers
- Retry mechanisms
- Dead-letter handling
- Ordering requirements
- Replay capabilities
- Routing and fanout patterns
- Failure behavior
- Evaluate message-delivery guarantees, acknowledgment behavior, visibility models, consumer-group behavior, and deduplication requirements.
- Assess idempotency, schema evolution, backpressure, event sequencing, and processing resilience.
- Determine whether current dependencies can be:
- Retained through a controlled exception
- Temporarily bridged
- Replaced with an equivalent target-platform service
- Redesigned using a different integration pattern
- Migrated only through application refactoring
- Identify differences in semantics between current and proposed technologies.
- Evaluate impacts to producers, consumers, platform services, security controls, deployment processes, and operational support.
- Assess observability, monitoring, alerting, tracing, and failure-recovery requirements.
- Perform bounded, non-production technical validation when needed.
- Identify platform backlog dependencies, sequencing constraints, migration risks, and operational considerations.
- Estimate the technical effort required for each migration path.
- Produce concise Engineering Assessment Inputs documenting:
- Semantic compatibility
- Architecture implications
- Application-refactoring requirements
- Migration sequencing
- Platform and security dependencies
- Operational risks
- Cutover and rollback considerations
- Likely future engineering effort
- Collaborate with application teams, integration architects, cloud platform owners, security teams, and operations stakeholders.
