Kafka: mercado
Apache Kafka is the event-streaming standard: the bus between microservices, a source for real-time analytics and the backbone of event-driven architectures. We track 5 818 open positions listing Kafka, 5 368 of them fresh. Backend needs Kafka for asynchronous service interaction, data engineers — for streaming pipelines (Kafka Streams, Flink, Spark Streaming), infrastructure — for operating clusters. Most of the demand comes from Backend, Fullstack and Data roles. It most often appears next to Java, Kubernetes and AWS. 35% of the postings allow fully remote work. Below is a live slice of Kafka demand.
O mercado de Kafka tem agora 5.818 vagas abertas, 5.368 delas observadas recentemente. Median salary $7.500/mo. Observed candidate pool — 1.434.
35% of Kafka postings allow fully remote work; the share counts only postings that state the work format.
⚠ salary known for 443 of 5818 jobs; remote share from 4964 with a stated format; 5368 counted as fresh observations; trend and hiring difficulty are not shown
Timeline: postings and sources
How many Kafka postings appeared each week since Aug 10, and from how many sources. The second line separates market growth from coverage growth: a jump in the week new sources were connected means we started seeing more, not that the market grew.
New postings and active sources per week
Sources over the period: 276
New sources connected: Aug 17 +28 · Aug 24 +25 · Aug 31 +24 · Sep 7 +15 · Sep 14 +20 · Sep 21 +30 · Sep 28 +9 · Oct 5 +10 · Oct 12 +22 · Oct 19 +22
Week = posting first-seen date, all statuses. A posting belongs to the technology by its stack tag; the series starts on 10 Aug 2026 — earlier tags were assigned differently and are not comparable. Sources are distinct collection channels; their names are not published.
Salaries over time
Median Kafka salary per week, USD per month.
Median salary, USD per month
Only postings with a USD salary and a known period (month or year), $500–$50,000 per month. Weeks with fewer than 10 such postings are left blank — that means no data, not zero.
Remote work over time
Share of Kafka postings offering fully remote work, per week.
Remote postings, %
The share is among postings that state a format (remote, hybrid, office). Weeks with fewer than 10 such postings are left blank.
Countries over time
How the share of Kafka postings in each of the top countries changed, per week.
Postings in the country, %
Share among postings with a known country; the chart shows the five countries with the most postings over six months. Weeks with fewer than 20 postings with a known country are left blank. A rising share can mean a newly connected source in that country rather than market growth.
Demanda e oferta observada
| Demanda aberta | 5.818 |
| Oferta observada | 1.434 |
⚠ candidates matching a vacancy are not counted yet: demand and the observed pool are shown
Distribuição de salários
Um em cada dez ganha menos de $3.695, um em cada dez mais de $16.666. Metade do mercado fica entre $5.750 e $12.916. Amostra: 443.
The range histogram for Kafka postings uses only postings with an explicit compensation range; the median is computed over the same sample.
Geografia da demanda
| país | vagas |
|---|---|
| PL | 1.373 |
| US | 981 |
| RU | 554 |
| IN | 360 |
| GB | 213 |
| DE | 183 |
| CA | 129 |
| SG | 87 |
| BR | 82 |
| ES | 80 |
The top country for Kafka demand is Poland (1 373 positions).
⚠ job counts only: salary by country is not published
Usada junto com
Kafka most often appears next to Java, Kubernetes and AWS. The Java and Kubernetes pairing reflects the typical setting: JVM services in containers.
Cargos que a usam
| cargo | vagas |
|---|---|
| Backend | 1.775 |
| Fullstack | 873 |
| Data | 818 |
| DevOps | 731 |
| Architect | 410 |
| Platform Engineer | 174 |
| QA | 150 |
| ML/AI | 140 |
| Analyst | 103 |
| SRE | 86 |
⚠ the `Other` and `IT` buckets are excluded as non-roles
Demanda por nível
| nível | vagas |
|---|---|
| senior | 2.433 |
| middle | 573 |
| principal | 426 |
| lead | 288 |
| junior | 174 |
Senior-and-above is about 81% of 3 894 graded Kafka postings.
⚠ demand side only: the grade of the observed pool is unknown for most of it
Empregadores
A demanda está distribuída entre 2.159 empregadores. O maior responde por 3.2%, os dez primeiros por 11.0%; os 89.0% restantes são cauda longa.
| proporção | valor |
|---|---|
| top 1 | 3.2% |
| top 3 | 6.2% |
| top 10 | 11.0% |
| cauda longa | 89.0% |
⚠ names are not shown: staffing agencies and end employers are not yet told apart by the classifier
Onde o Zorky vê este mercado
Observado em 187 fontes; a maior responde por 20.7%: este mercado não depende de um único canal.
Kafka postings arrive mostly from ATS & career sites and job boards & aggregators.
Vagas recentes
- Associate Software Engineer · US
- System Analyst · RU
- Инженер по автоматизации тестирования (сессионный антифрод) · RU
- Backend Java Engineer - Kazakhstan/Russian speaker · KZ
- Cloud Engineer · US
- Middle/Middle+ ML OPS Engineer (Сбер. Офис) · RU
- Backend-разработчик (PHP/Yii2) · RU
- Tech Lead (Backend)
Mercados adjacentes
⚠ adjacent markets for comparison are not defined yet
Como é medido
- Vaga
- an open job that cleared the quality gate and lists at least two technologies
- Candidato observado
- a candidate whose stack contains this technology; an aggregate — not a single record leaves the perimeter
- Candidato compatível
- not counted yet
- Janela
- jobs open at the moment the snapshot was built
Sobre os dados
- Alguns detalhamentos estão ocultos: a cobertura de dados deles ainda não é suficiente.
- As estatísticas só aparecem onde a amostra passa por um controle de qualidade.
- A ausência de um bloco não significa valor zero.
Detalhamentos ocultos no momento: 7.
Dados de 2026-10-27
Perguntas frequentes
Common questions about the Kafka market — short answers from the same data slice.
Is Kafka a backend skill or a data-engineering skill?
Both, with different focus: backend cares about producers and consumers, delivery semantics, idempotency and message schemas; data engineers — stream processing and connectors; DevOps — partitioning, replication and cluster monitoring.
What do Kafka interviews ask about?
Partitions and message ordering, consumer groups and rebalancing, at-least-once versus exactly-once, retention and compaction, Schema Registry, error handling and retries.
How does Kafka differ from RabbitMQ in requirements?
Kafka is an event log with storage and replay, built for high throughput and analytics; RabbitMQ is a classic queue broker with flexible routing. Many postings name both, but Kafka leads in high-load systems.
How big is Kafka demand?
The slice tracks 5 818 open positions listing Kafka. Dedicated 'Kafka engineers' are few — the skill is part of backend, data and platform profiles and noticeably lifts a candidate in the shortlist.