Java Core Engineer

Palo Alto, CA or Remote (Hybrid Optional)

About aklivity

Founded by the pioneers of WebSocket, Aklivity is redefining how enterprises manage real-time data. Our efforts center on the next-generation of API infrastructure that transforms operational data streams into real-time data products. Platform teams at organizations like Siemens, Kone and N Brown rely on Aklivity to deliver reliable, highly performant governed access to real-time data across teams, applications and systems.

We're a tight-knit, seasoned team of innovators and doers backed by leading investors including 468 Capital, Pear Ventures and Alumni Ventures.

The Role

We’re looking for a Java Core Engineer who thrives on low-level performance work, streaming systems, and protocol design. You’ll help shape the internals of Zilla—building lock-free, memory-efficient, zero-GC components that power our blazing-fast Kafka proxy.

What You'll Do

  • Design new features based on technical requirements of Apache Kafka centric event-driven architectures, aligning with protocol mobile and IoT client capabilities, such as REST, WebSockets, HTTP/3, GraphQL, MQTT and AMQP.
  • Anticipate Zilla runtime performance impact of design decisions, based on experience with different Java coding techniques such as flyweights vs object allocation and the corresponding latency introduced by garbage collection.
  • Estimate implementation time based on experience with similar difficulty tasks to support delivery of project management milestones.
  • Help map community enhancement requests to technical requirements by analyzing user needs and aligning with the high performance architecture of Aklivity Zilla project.

What We're Looking For

  • A passion for working on deeply technical projects including distributed systems, concurrency & parallelism, application protocols, file systems & correctness.
  • Solid understanding of the Java ecosystem (JVM, JRE, JDK).
  • Solid understanding of web and network protocols and standards (HTTP, TLS, TCP/IP, DNS, etc).
  • Solid understanding of messaging systems (Kafka, AMQP, MQTT, JMS)
  • Excellent communication (verbal/written) and collaboration skills.
  • Self-starter attitude.

Why Aklivity

  • Be part of a small, senior team building a product that’s reshaping real-time data infrastructure.
  • Own core user-facing systems from the ground up.
  • Work with customers who are deploying cutting-edge streaming architectures at global scale.
  • Competitive salary, early equity, and benefits.
  • Remote-first with flexible work culture.

Apply for this Role

Awesome! We're excited for your expressed interest and will be in touch if there's a fit.
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