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. -…