Pavlo Z.Private profile: Upwork shows its earnings only to signed-in members, so we check it every few weeks, not daily. MRR here is a rough estimate (Upwork's six-month earnings ÷ months active). Last read Nov 5, 2026.

Hi, I'm Pavlo, an Apache Kafka engineer and Java developer with 11 years of backend work and 7+ years building Kafka streaming pipelines at Euristiq, an AWS Advanced Tier partner. If your Kafka consumers lag at peak, events go missing after a rebalance, or you need a streaming data engineer to build the pipeline right the first time, that is exactly what I do. What that looks like in numbers: ▸ 18+ Java microservices moved onto Apache Kafka for an identity verification platform, with PII deleted automatically after each check ▸ Java developer on Kafka, Kotlin and Spring services for a workforce platform used by 400+ enterprise brands, 97% fewer manual errors ▸ 100% Job Success on Upwork: an Apache Flink PoC (118 hours) and a Kafka Streams pipeline (93 hours), both 5.0 of 5 ▸ AWS Solutions Architect Associate ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🔷 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗜 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸 Send me your Kafka topic layout or pipeline diagram. Within 24 hours I'll tell you whether it fits your scale and the first three things I'd change, before any contract. Then a written design: topics, partitions, consumer groups, delivery semantics and failure handling. Then I build it myself as your Apache Kafka engineer and Java developer, in Java or Kotlin on Spring Boot or Apache Flink, deployed on Kubernetes with lag and broker monitoring in place. And a handover with docs and runbooks, so your team owns the pipeline. 🔷 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗜 𝗖𝗮𝗻 𝗛𝗲𝗹𝗽 ▸ Apache Kafka engineer work: topic and partition strategy, consumer groups, exactly-once delivery ▸ Java developer for Kafka Streams and Kafka Connect: state stores, joins, windowing, CDC with Debezium, schema registry, Confluent tooling ▸ Apache Flink on Kafka: event time, watermarks, checkpointing, real-time alerting ▸ Data engineer work: ETL pipelines, batch and streaming, Elasticsearch indexing downstream of Kafka ▸ Java developer work: Spring Boot and Kotlin microservices, REST and GraphQL APIs ▸ Apache Kafka engineer migrations: REST or queue-based services moved onto Kafka ▸ Data engineer work for IoT: MQTT telemetry into Kafka topics ▸ Kafka DevOps for data engineer teams: Docker, Kubernetes and CI/CD on AWS and GCP 🔷 KAFKA PROBLEMS I FIX MOST OFTEN ▸ Consumer lag that climbs every peak hour ▸ Hot partitions from a poor message key ▸ Duplicate or lost events after a rebalance or broker restart ▸ Kafka Streams state stores that take hours to restore ▸ Schema changes that break downstream consumers ▸ Kafka Connect tasks that fail silently overnight ▸ Apache Flink jobs that fall behind on checkpoints 🔷 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁𝘀 ▸ Apache Kafka engineer on an identity verification platform: 18+ Java microservices migrated to Kafka ▸ Java developer on a document verification service adopted by the US and Canadian governments, shipped in 7 months with a 30+ engineer team ▸ Data engineer on a Kafka Streams data transformation pipeline for an Upwork client, 93 hours, 5.0 of 5 ▸ Apache Flink PoC consuming from Kafka for real-time alert processing, 118 hours, 5.0 of 5 ▸ Apache Kafka engineer for a partition strategy fix and architecture review, 5.0 of 5 🔷 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗖𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗦𝗮𝘆 "Pavlo is a great developer to work with. Strong technical skills and communication. Will hire again in the future." - Upwork client, Kafka Streams data transformation pipeline ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Stack I use as a data engineer and Java developer: Apache Kafka, Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, Confluent schema registry, Apache Flink, Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, GCP, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, GraphQL, MQTT. Need an Apache Kafka engineer, an Apache Flink pair of hands, a streaming data engineer or a Java developer for Kafka-heavy services? Send me your topic layout or pipeline diagram and I'll reply with the first three things I'd change.