If you’re passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country—and you’re committed to working hard to play your part in building that future—consider WGU as the next step in your career.

Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.

The salary range for this position takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.

At WGU, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their position, and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is:
 

Pay Range: $157,000.00 - $243,400.00

Job Description

We are looking for an experienced Enterprise Architect with deep expertise in event-driven architecture (EDA) and Apache Kafka to join our team. In this role, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, and optimizing our enterprise event-driven systems to enable real-time data processing and integration across the organization. You will lead the creation of scalable, fault-tolerant, and high-throughput data pipelines and advise on best practices for implementing Kafka and related technologies.

Key Responsibilities:

Architecture Design and Strategy

• Develop and implement an enterprise-wide event-driven architecture strategy, utilizing Apache Kafka to support real-time data streaming and integration.

• Design highly scalable and resilient data architectures that align with organizational goals, ensuring that systems are optimized for low-latency and high-throughput use cases.

• Define and enforce EDA standards, protocols, and practices that facilitate reliable communication between services and systems.

Kafka Implementation and Optimization

• Architect, deploy, and manage Kafka clusters and Kafka-based solutions for event streaming and processing across various business domains.

• Design and implement Kafka topics, partitions, and schemas, ensuring optimal throughput and efficient data distribution.

• Drive Kafka performance tuning, including managing retention policies, consumer lag monitoring, and replication configurations to support high availability and fault tolerance.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with application development, data engineering, and DevOps teams to ensure seamless integration and operationalization of Kafka and EDA components.

• Partner with business stakeholders to identify use cases that benefit from event-driven approaches and translate them into architectural requirements.

• Facilitate regular architecture review sessions to align Kafka and EDA implementation with broader enterprise architecture objectives.

Governance and Compliance

• Define data governance and security standards for event data, including access controls, data retention policies, and data encryption for compliance with organizational and regulatory standards.

• Establish monitoring, alerting, and logging practices for Kafka infrastructure to ensure reliability, transparency, and quick incident resolution.

Innovation and Best Practices

• Research and propose new tools, technologies, and methodologies that complement event-driven architectures, such as Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, and other data-streaming frameworks.

• Promote best practices for EDA, including event modeling, message format standardization, and handling of event sourcing and eventual consistency.

• Stay current with the latest developments in EDA, Kafka, and related open-source tools to continually improve the architecture’s performance and adaptability.

Required Skills & Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or related career experience

• 8+ years of experience in enterprise architecture, with a focus on distributed systems and event-driven architectures.

• Proven expertise in designing, implementing, and scaling Kafka-based solutions for real-time data processing.

• Advanced knowledge of Apache Kafka, Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, and related ecosystem components.

• Proficiency in designing data streaming architectures, message-driven microservices, and asynchronous communication patterns.

• Strong experience with DevOps practices, including Kafka cluster deployment, monitoring, and automation tools.

• Familiarity with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure) and container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes) for Kafka management.

• Exceptional analytical skills, strong communication abilities, and experience working with diverse, cross-functional teams.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Certifications in enterprise architecture (e.g., TOGAF) or Kafka (e.g., Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka).

• Experience with complementary streaming tools, such as Spark, Flink, or Pulsar.

• Understanding of data governance frameworks and practices for secure data streaming.

#LI-ZARD

Position & Application Details

Full-Time Regular Positions (classified as regular and working 40 standard weekly hours): This is a full-time, regular position (classified for 40 standard weekly hours) that is eligible for bonuses; medical, dental, vision, telehealth and mental healthcare; health savings account and flexible spending account; basic and voluntary life insurance; disability coverage; accident, critical illness and hospital indemnity supplemental coverages; legal and identity theft coverage; retirement savings plan; wellbeing program; discounted WGU tuition; and flexible paid time off for rest and relaxation with no need for accrual, flexible paid sick time with no need for accrual, 11 paid holidays, and other paid leaves, including up to 12 weeks of parental leave.

How to Apply: If interested, an application will need to be submitted online. Internal WGU employees will need to apply through the internal job board in Workday.

Additional Information

Disclaimer: The job posting highlights the most critical responsibilities and requirements of the job. It’s not all-inclusive.

Accommodations: Applicants with disabilities who require assistance or accommodation during the application or interview process should contact our Talent Acquisition team at [email protected].

Equal Opportunity Employer: We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or protected veteran status. #DEI