Principal Engineer I - Confluent

IBM; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 6,000,000 - 9,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Confluent in Bengaluru seeks a senior engineering leader to drive the Observability and Monetisation charter, architecting scalable cloud features and guiding the roadmap for Confluent Cloud and hybrid platforms. You will mentor engineers, review designs, influence technology decisions, and partner with product management across teams to deliver reliable, production-grade solutions at scale.

Requires 15+ years in software development, deep systems knowledge, and a proven track record in leading

Qualifications

• 15+ years of hands-on software development experience.
• Experience shipping production software; roll up your sleeves.
• Experience with large-scale systems and cloud production services.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems and concurrency.
• Self-starter who works well in teams and influences decisions.
• BS in Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent; broad tech knowledge.
• On-call production issue handling and debugging.

Responsibilities

• Evolve Observability and Monetisation features and roadmaps.
• Review designs, code, and raise technical standards.
• Lead technology charter for Cloud and hybrid platforms.
• Mentor engineers and leaders, fostering growth.
• Collaborate with product management and engineering leadership across teams.

Skills

Distributed systems

Concurrent programming

Cloud operations

Code review

Mentorship

Leadership

On-call support

Roadmap planning

Communication

Technical influence

Education

Bachelor's Degree

Master's Degree

Tools

Kafka

Flink

Druid

OpenSearch

Job description

Your role and responsibilities

The charter of the Confluent Observability and Monetisation team has been continuously expanding since its inception. You will technically drive the advancements in an expanding Confluent Observability and Monetisation charter. We want to ensure the quality of our Confluent Cloud features raise the bar. You will design and build technology for this. How do we enable our cloud and hybrid customers to gain insight into the health and performance of their Confluent resources quickly and effectively, ensuring that the experience of operating Confluent is unmatched? How do we bring forth new capabilities with rock-solid reliability while growing to 10x scale and beyond? How do we enable near real-time use cases for our customers most challenging use cases? This means being able to handle open-ended strategy in this area. Confluent needs you to explore and experiment with new ideas that benefit customers and not merely be driven by a list of requirements to deliver.

You will be one of the leading technologists across the Confluent Observability and Monetisation organization. You will architect and design solutions and review design implementations and code. You will have the opportunity to work across the breadth and depth of technology in Confluent. Being in such engineering teams requires you to handle not only the operational and engineering excellence but also aid in development of the roadmap, evolving vision and direction for the team. Collaboration with the rest of the organization will be essential to make progress on the roadmap, support Confluents product initiatives, and make the vision a reality.

What You Will Do:

• You will work with a team of engineers and architects to help evolve Confluent Observability and Monetisation features. Work closely with product management, engineering leadership, and other key stakeholders across various teams in Confluent to build and drive the overall roadmap. Need you to be a strong tech voice outside Confluent Observability and Monetisation within Confluent.
• Influence the overall domain health and operational hygiene for Confluent Observability. We need a tech champion for the observability capabilities we provide to our customers. You are expected to review designs and code and improve our technical standards.
• We are looking at you to lead the technology charter for our observability and monetisation features in Confluent Cloud and in hybrid scenarios with Confluent Platform.
• Mentor a team of high-performing engineers and leads, helping them to continue in growing their skill set through hands-on experience and mentorship.
• Be a strong technical leader and representative for engineering teams in India.
• Provide timely and productive feedback, encourage a growth mindset, and advise team members in setting and working toward personal development goals.
• Nurture a culture of excellence on the team through a focus on hiring, communication, execution, and work quality.
• Create and manage processes that enable the team to do its best work.

Required education

Bachelor's Degree

Preferred education

Master's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

• Minimum of 15+ years of hands-on software development experience with the ability to anticipate future technical needs for the product and craft plans to realize them.
• Taking ideas to production is something we look for.
• Ready to roll up your sleeves - code, debug, design - do whatever it takes to ship the product to production.
• Experience building and operating large-scale systems. Solid understanding of basic systems operations (disk, network, operating systems, etc). Experience running production services in the cloud.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development. Solid fundamentals in concurrent and multi-threading programming.
• A self-starter with the ability to work effectively in teams. Proactively identifying the symptoms of technical issues and reason about their causes is needed. This will be followed by fixing the root causes.
• Timely shipping of deliverables; being able to trade-off short term technical decisions with the long term. Move fast, build in increments, and iterate. A sense of urgency, a mindset towards achieving results, and excellent prioritization skills.
• Ability to influence the team, peers and upper management in technology decisions using effective communication and collaborative techniques
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent experience. Understanding of various technologies, programming paradigms and frameworks is needed. Ability to be pragmatic and trade off their usage in production is essential.
• Ability to take on intense customer production issues on-call; debugging and mitigating them will be needed. This requires patient log and metrics analysis with solid reasoning to nail the issue.

Preferred technical and professional experience

Experience in designing and developing effective solutions for systems observability problems, including effective enablement of metrics, logging, events, or traces capabilities.

Experience in designing and developing billing and monetization pipelines tailored for cloud-scale systems, including a solid grasp of metering and rate cards.

Experience using and operating Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Apache Druid, and OpenSearch is a big plus.

Interest in evangelism (giving talks at tech conferences, writing blog posts evangelizing Kafka).

Experience working on stream processing technology or query processing systems.

Years of Experience:

15 - 20