About
A consulting practice that does one thing: Kafka.
MessagePilots is a US consulting practice focused entirely on Apache Kafka and the event-streaming systems built on it. Cluster architecture, topic and schema design, Streams and Connect pipelines, KRaft and cloud migrations, monitoring and capacity — one technology, treated as a discipline.
Why a specialist practice
Kafka sits in an awkward organizational spot: critical enough that outages make the incident channel, specialized enough that most teams cannot justify a full-time expert. General-purpose consultancies staff it with whoever is free; vendor professional services arrive knowing the destination in advance. A focused practice is the third option — engineers who work on streaming platforms all day, with no platform to sell you.
What we believe about streaming infrastructure
Uneventful is the goal. A good streaming platform is one nobody talks about. The interesting engineering is in the design margins, the monitoring, and the rehearsals that make production quiet.
Measurement beats folklore. Partition counts, broker sizing, and capacity plans come from throughput you measured under your settings, not from a blog post's cluster.
Guarantees are decisions. Ordering, delivery semantics, and retention are trade-offs to be made explicitly and written down — not defaults to be discovered during an incident review.
The client's team is the point. Documents, explanations, and pairing are part of every engagement, because the platform belongs to the people on call for it.
How we work
Hourly time and materials with senior US engineers, remote-first, in your tooling and your process. The engagement models and the method are on the approach page; the ways to start are under services.