Remote Eventing / Messaging / Cloud-Native Integration Engineer

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.