Overview Inabia is seeking a backend-focused Software Development Engineer (SDE) to own streaming infrastructure and operational readiness on a 12-month onsite engagement in Redmond, WA. This role is heavily backend and operations-weighted, centered on Apache Kudu and Apache Flink running on AWS in production real-time data systems. It is an ideal fit for an engineer who values deep end-to-end system ownership, operational rigor, and the satisfaction of keeping mission-critical pipelines reliable at scale. Responsibilities - Own and operate backend streaming services built on Apache Flink for real-time data processing - Develop deep working knowledge of Apache Kudu as the fast, mutable columnar storage layer and serve as the primary subject matter expert for its operational behavior - Work within the Kudu + Flink architecture, with Kudu handling low-latency storage and Flink handling stream processing on top of it - Build and maintain ETL pipelines feeding the streaming layer - Design and implement operational readiness processes — runbooks, alerting strategies, failure recovery procedures, and capacity planning — for the full streaming stack - Manage and troubleshoot workloads on Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) within an AWS-managed infrastructure environment - Perform hands-on operational work including monitoring, incident response, performance tuning, and system reliability improvements - Collaborate with the broader engineering team to harden open-source infrastructure components for production use Key Qualifications - U.S. Citizen or Green Card holder; no sponsorship available (no C2C, H-1B transfer, OPT/CPT, TN, or any third-party visa) - 4+ years of professional backend software development experience - Hands-on experience with streaming technologies such as Apache Flink, Kafka Streams, or Spark Streaming - Experience with distributed storage systems (Apache Kudu preferred; Cassandra, HBase, or comparable systems also relevant) - Production experience with Kubernetes (Amazon EKS preferred) and AWS-managed infrastructure - Comfortable carrying heavy operational and on-call responsibilities, not solely feature development - Ability to work onsite in Redmond, WA five days per week for the full 12-month contract duration Preferred Qualifications - Direct experience running Apache Kudu and Apache Flink together in a production real-time analytics or similar architecture - Experience building operational readiness frameworks from scratch, including runbooks, SLOs, and alerting strategy - Background contributing to or deeply operating open-source infrastructure projects in a production context - Strong troubleshooting instincts and composure under production pressure