Hire streaming data engineer talent in a specialized niche where batch data engineers don't have the distributed systems expertise and backend engineers don't have the data processing patterns. Streaming engineering requires understanding: event ordering guarantees, exactly-once vs at-least-once semantics, watermarks and late data handling, state management in stream processors, and the failure recovery patterns unique to streaming systems.
Production streaming requires: Event ingestion — Kafka cluster management, topic design, partition strategy, replication. Stream processing — Spark Structured Streaming windowed aggregations, Kafka Streams for lightweight processing. State management — checkpointing, exactly-once semantics, compacted topics. Integration — streaming to lakehouse (Delta, Iceberg), real-time dashboards, alerting systems.