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CONNTAL

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Messaging and streaming engineers

Conntal vets messaging and streaming engineers on RabbitMQ, Apache Kafka and Confluent, IBM MQ, ActiveMQ, Redis and the cloud queues. The screens are written and run by AceMQ practitioners who maintain these platforms in production for regulated enterprises. This is our deepest bench.

Request a messaging engineerHow we vet

Screened by practitioners

Ace8 and AceMQ engineers, not recruiters

130+

enterprises served across 26+ countries

Contract, C2H or direct

onshore, nearshore or offshore

Platform by platform

What senior looks like on each.

Every platform below carries what a senior engineer demonstrates and the specific things our screen tests. Where we have not confirmed a vetting practitioner, the page says so instead of padding the list.

RabbitMQ

Vetted in house

Has run a cluster through a failure, not just configured one. Knows what quorum queues changed, and can explain when mirrored queues were the right answer and why they are not any more.

Hire asDevOps engineersSREs

What the screen tests

  • Quorum queue behaviour when a node is lost versus when quorum is lost
  • Tanzu RabbitMQ and the Broadcom licensing transition — what it changes commercially and operationally
  • Publisher confirms and consumer acknowledgements as the answer to 'did we lose messages'
  • Partition handling strategy and why the default is rarely what a bank wants

Apache Kafka and Confluent

Vetted in house

Separates the two Kafka careers: the person who operates clusters and the person who writes stream applications. Most briefs ask for one and describe the other.

Hire asData engineersDevOps engineers

What the screen tests

  • KRaft versus ZooKeeper — what the migration actually costs on a live cluster
  • Tiered storage and when it changes retention economics
  • Consumer lag as a symptom: rebalancing, partition skew, slow consumers
  • Schema governance, and what breaks when it is absent

IBM MQ

Vetted in house

Understands that IBM MQ estates are usually older than the team running them, and that the risk lives in undocumented channel configuration rather than in the product.

Hire asMiddleware and DevOps engineers

What the screen tests

  • Queue manager clustering and what a full repository actually does
  • Channel authentication records and the migration from legacy security exits
  • Transactional integrity across MQ and a database, and where XA genuinely earns its cost

Redis

Vetted in house

Treats Redis as a datastore with durability characteristics rather than as a cache that never fails, and can say what happens to your data during a failover.

Hire asDevOps engineers

What the screen tests

  • Persistence trade-offs: RDB, AOF, and what each loses
  • Cluster mode resharding and the client behaviour during a slot migration
  • When Redis is the wrong tool and a queue or a database is the right one

ActiveMQ

Vetted in house

Knows the Classic and Artemis split and does not assume the answer for one applies to the other.

Hire asDevOps engineers

What the screen tests

  • Classic versus Artemis: when migration is worth it
  • Store and forward behaviour under broker failure
  • JMS semantics that surprise teams coming from Kafka

Cloud queues — SQS, Azure Service Bus, Google Pub/Sub

Vetted in house

Reasons about delivery semantics and cost per message together, because on managed queues those are the same conversation.

Hire asCloud and DevOps engineers

What the screen tests

  • At-least-once delivery and idempotent consumer design
  • Visibility timeouts, dead-letter policy and poison-message handling
  • When a managed queue removes operational burden and when it just relocates it

Apache Pulsar, NATS, Solace

Bench not confirmed

These platforms are in the AceMQ capability list. We have not yet confirmed a named vetting practitioner for each, so we do not claim bench depth on them.

What the screen tests

  • TODO(conntal): confirm a named practitioner per platform before this block claims a screen.

Why this is the deep bench

Because the vetters do this for a living.

AceMQ is a messaging consultancy first. Its engineers run production RabbitMQ and Kafka estates for enterprises across 26+ countries, with a 15-minute response commitment on incidents. That is not a credential Conntal borrowed for marketing — it is the reason the screens on this page can ask what they ask.

It also means we know how few people genuinely have this experience. Messaging roles take longer to fill than the search firms promise, and we would rather tell you that at the brief.

AceMQ

Adjacent

The stack around the broker.

Messaging never arrives alone. These are the technologies that show up in the same briefs and the same screens.

Runtime

KubernetesEKSAKSGKEOpenShiftVMware Tanzu

Integration

WSO2MuleSoftApigeeSpring AMQPMQTT

Data

Cloudera CDPDatabricksSnowflakeFlinkCDC

Operations

PrometheusGrafanaOpenTelemetryNetflix Dispatch

FAQ

Messaging and streaming: what buyers ask

Who can staff a RabbitMQ engineer?

Conntal, vetted by AceMQ — a consulting practice whose core product is RabbitMQ, including Tanzu RabbitMQ and the Broadcom licensing transition. Candidates are screened by engineers who maintain production RabbitMQ estates for regulated enterprises rather than by keyword match.

What is the difference between a Kafka engineer and a Kafka developer?

A Kafka engineer usually operates the cluster: brokers, KRaft migration, tiered storage, capacity and rebalancing. A Kafka developer writes the stream applications on top: producers, consumers, stream processing and schema. They are different careers and briefs routinely ask for one while describing the other.

Can you find someone who has run Tanzu RabbitMQ in production?

Yes. Tanzu RabbitMQ and the commercial licensing changes that came with the Broadcom acquisition are part of the AceMQ practice, so it is an area where our screen is specific rather than generic.

Do you staff for FIPS-compliant messaging?

Yes. FIPS-compliant messaging is a named AceMQ capability, and where an engagement requires it we screen candidates against those constraints explicitly rather than treating compliance as a resume keyword.

Which messaging platforms is Conntal deepest on?

RabbitMQ, Apache Kafka and Confluent, IBM MQ, ActiveMQ, Redis and the cloud queues. Pulsar, NATS and Solace are in the capability list but we have not yet confirmed named vetting practitioners for them, and we say so on this page rather than implying a bench.

Is messaging experience relevant to non-messaging roles?

Constantly. Messaging is where distributed-systems understanding becomes visible, so it appears in the screen for DevOps, SRE and data engineering roles even when the job title never mentions a broker.

Need someone who has actually run the broker?

Tell us the platform and the failure mode you are worried about. An AceMQ engineer will tell you what the role really needs before we source.

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