Ah well done! Sorry I wasn't around when you sent your first message. jackdaw does have it's own implementation of the confluent avro serde but IMO you're better off using the builtin one as you're already doing for the reasons described in the README of the project linked below. The drawback is that it's a bit of a pain to build a generic data record by manually .put ing values into the fields. I actually created a tiny library to make this a bit easier. https://github.com/cddr/edn-avro