Event Driven Software Engineer

Event Driven SME Software Engineer Contract: Inside IR35 Location: Sheffield – 2–3 days per week We’re looking for an experienced Event Driven SME Software Engineer to join a greenfield project building a large-scale, high-throughput platform processing billions of cloud telemetry and log events every day. You’ll be hands-on with the design and engineering of event-driven data ingestion and streaming capabilities, helping shape the architecture, engineering standards and testing strategy across the platform. Key Responsibilities * Build high-volume, event-driven data ingestion pipelines across multiple Cloud Service Providers. * Design and engineer streaming solutions using Kafka and Flink, with Java-based services and jobs. * Deploy and operate cloud-based services with a focus on scalability, resilience, security and observability. * Contribute to technical architecture covering event schemas, partitioning, ordering, state, replay, retention and failure handling. * Optimise solutions for performance and cost at significant scale. * Establish mature automated testing across unit, integration, contract, end-to-end and performance testing. * Work with cloud-native data collection approaches across AWS, Azure and GCP. * Contribute to CI/CD, infrastructure automation and operational best practices. Essential Experience * Proven experience delivering large-scale event-driven systems in production. * Strong hands-on Kafka experience, including partitioning, consumer groups, ordering, schema evolution, retention and replay. * Strong hands-on Flink or equivalent stream-processing experience, including stateful processing, checkpoints, back-pressure and delivery semantics. * Excellent software engineering skills, with strong knowledge of clean code, design patterns, microservices, TDD/BDD and performance engineering. * Strong cloud engineering experience, ideally AWS. * Demonstrable experience building robust automated testing strategies and driving a quality-first engineering culture. * Strong understanding of scalability, performance, bottlenecks and cost optimisation at high volumes. Desirable * Multi-cloud telemetry/log collection experience across AWS, Azure and GCP. * Terraform and Infrastructure as Code. * Strong CI/CD and automated deployment experience. * Experience contributing to cloud/application architecture while remaining hands-on technically. * Observability and SRE practices. This is a genuinely hands-on SME role for someone who can make architectural decisions, write production-quality code and build platforms that are scalable, resilient, testable and cost-effective