Senior Data Platform Engineer — Kafka & PostgreSQL

We are looking for an experienced Senior Data Platform Engineer to own the event-streaming, transactional database, and custom connectivity backbone driving the k0rdent-ai platform — our multi-tenant control plane for enterprise GPU infrastructure. Every cluster provisioned, every GPU-hour consumed, and every tenant action produces high-cardinality metadata that must be transactionally recorded and securely isolated. You will architect the core pipeline connecting our streaming data plane (Apache Kafka via Strimzi) to our relational data tier (Open Source PostgreSQL via CloudNativePG), which runs across both elastic Kubernetes clusters and high-performance bare metal hardware. Beyond standard administration, a substantial focus of this role is custom ecosystem engineering: deep Go (Golang) systems programming to build custom open-source clients and connectors, design specialized integration libraries, and develop proprietary middleware that bridges our database multi-tenancy with enterprise identity planes like Active Directory (AD)/LDAP. Because this system is the transactional record of every tenant action across the platform, this role also owns its disaster-recovery posture — designing how the platform survives a full region or cluster loss, not just a single-node failure. Main Responsibilities Hybrid Database Architecture: Design, deploy, and operate high-availability Open Source PostgreSQL topologies (via CloudNativePG on Kubernetes and native Patroni-style topologies on bare metal) and distributed Apache Kafka clusters (via Strimzi), across both containerized Kubernetes environments and high-performance bare metal hardware. Custom Client & Connector Development : Write custom, enterprise-grade open-source Kafka clients, standalone connector services, and utility libraries from scratch using preferably Go (Golang) to extend data capabilities where off-the-shelf tooling falls short. Enterprise Identity & Data Integration: Architect and build system integrations connecting PostgreSQL authentication and row-level security (RLS) policy evaluation to enterprise Active Directory (AD), LDAP, and OIDC identity providers — via role-mapping and session-context layers (e.g., mapped Postgres roles, JWT claims consumed by RLS policies) rather than a direct connection. Transactional Architecture & CDC: Scale high-throughput Change Data Capture (CDC) pipelines via Debezium and Kafka Connect. Implement resilient architectural patterns to maintain absolute data integrity between databases and topics without dual-write risk. Cross-Region Resilience & Disaster Recovery : Design and operate cross-region failover and disaster-recovery orchestration for both PostgreSQL and Kafka — including replication topology (sync vs. async trade-offs), split-brain prevention via quorum/witness mechanisms, and explicit RPO/RTO targets for a full region or cluster loss, not just single-node HA. PostgreSQL & Infra Tuning : Optimize PostgreSQL instances for heavy…