Kafka Mastery (Senior → Principal)

Operate

• Confirm whether Kafka is solving event streaming, integration decoupling, replayability, or auditability.
• Design topics, keys, and retention with business semantics and recovery strategy in mind.
• Treat consumer lag, rebalance behavior, and schema evolution as first-class concerns.
• Prefer explicit delivery semantics over magical “exactly once” assumptions.

Default Standards

• Partition by stable business keys with clear ordering needs.
• Consumers must be idempotent.
• Retention and compaction are product decisions, not only infra settings.
• Observe lag, throughput, error rate, rebalance churn, and ISR health.

References