Confluent - Principal Engineer I - Stream Governance

IBM; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software in San Diego is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the architecture and delivery of large-scale governance systems for streaming data.

You will own core domains, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product leadership to balance technical depth with business impact, ensuring reliability and scale across Confluent‑like platforms.

This role requires autonomy in ambiguous spaces and a track record of shaping technology strategy across multiple teams.

Qualifications

• Experience leading the architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems.
• Knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, scalability, and cloud-native platforms.
• Experience with schema management, data catalogs, or metadata/governance systems.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and influence stakeholders at the executive level.
• Strong track record of delivering trusted streaming governance solutions.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive company-level technical strategy for governance systems, ensuring long-term innovation for schema and metadata infrastructure.
• Architect and evolve high-performance metadata management systems with low-latency lookups and strong consistency across streaming and processing engines.
• Design and evolve data protection capabilities—encryption, access control, and schema validation—across the platform.
• Build and maintain highly available, multi-tenant infrastructure for governance services.
• Establish and evangelize engineering standards, architectural patterns, and technical frameworks across the organization.
• Collaborate with executives, product management, and engineering leaders to align technical vision with business objectives.
• Mentor senior and staff engineers to grow technical leadership and foster open-source contribution.
• Contribute to relevant open-source projects and represent Confluent externally through talks and thought leadership.

Skills

Distributed systems

Leadership

Cloud-native

Schema governance

Open-source

Mentorship

Education

Master's degree

Tools

Confluent Platform

Schema Registry

Cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP)

Job description

Introduction

At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You’ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM’s product and technology landscape. Here, you’ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world.

Introduction

At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You’ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM’s product and technology landscape. Here, you’ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world.

Your Role And Responsibilities

About the Role

Confluent's Data Streaming Platform is only as trustworthy as the schemas, metadata, and policies that govern it. As more of the platform's value shifts toward real-time processing and AI-driven decisioning, the systems that keep data well-formed, reliable, discoverable, and compliant, from the moment it’s produced through every downstream consumer, become as critical to correctness as the storage and compute layers themselves. The governance layer and the stream catalog integrates the Data Streaming Platform into a unified, intuitive and intelligent product to serve the critical real-time use cases for our customers. Confluent Schema Registry – a foundational building block for streaming governance is a widely adopted infrastructure in the industry supporting over 4 Million schemas across 60 K customer‑facing clusters with throughputs as high as 5 K reqs/sec for some use cases. Solving complex distributed systems challenges at this scale is one of the core dimensions of this role. As a Principal Engineer, you will be a key technical leader shaping the long‑term architecture, scalability, and reliability of Confluent’s schema and metadata governance systems, and their integration across the broader Confluent Streaming Platform. You will focus on advancing the core layers of Stream Governance, including highly available, multi‑tenant infrastructure and the systems responsible for schema management, data policy enforcement, and metadata consistency at scale. You will own company‑level technical domains, set direction for critical initiatives, and influence both engineering practices and product strategy. This role requires operating with autonomy in highly ambiguous spaces, making decisions that balance technical depth with business impact to ensure reliability and scalability for governance services across all of Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform.

What You Will Do

• Technical Strategy & Leadership: Define and drive company-level technical strategy for critical governance systems, ensuring long-term innovation for schema and metadata infrastructure.
• Metadata Architecture & Lifecycle Management: Architect and evolve high-performance metadata management systems that support low-latency lookups, strong consistency guarantees, and coherent behavior across streaming and processing engines.
• Data Policy & Governance Systems: Design and evolve data protection capabilities — including encryption, access control, and schema validation — enforced consistently across the platform.
• Platform Engineering: Build and maintain highly available, multi-tenant infrastructure for governance services, ensuring the platform is optimized for scalability, reliability, and resilience.
• Architectural Excellence: Establish and evangelize engineering standards, architectural patterns, and technical frameworks adopted across the organization.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with executives, product management, and engineering leaders across the platform to align technical vision with business objectives — working across team boundaries to build consensus on shared architecture decisions you don't have direct authority over.
• Mentorship & Culture: Mentor senior and staff-level engineers, growing future technical leaders and shaping a culture of engineering excellence and open-source contribution.
• Open-Source & External Representation: Contribute to relevant open-source projects and represent Confluent externally through technical talks and thought leadership.

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• Deep Expertise: A proven track record of leading the architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems with company-level impact.
• Distributed Systems Mastery: Comprehensive knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, scalability, and cloud-native platforms.
• Streaming Architecture Fluency: Working depth with streaming or event-driven architectures, and familiarity with adjacent domains such as schema management, data catalogs, or metadata/governance systems.
• Strategic Influence: Ability to navigate ambiguity, reduce systemic complexity, and anticipate industry trends to design systems for the next 3–5 years.
• Leadership Presence: Strong ability to influence executives and stakeholders while fostering a collaborative environment across multiple teams.
• Execution: Demonstrated ability to move from high-level vision to detailed technical implementation and delivery, with a strong bias toward shipped, adopted outcomes over theoretical design.

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Industry Leadership: Recognized industry thought leader through open-source contributions or driving initiatives from ground up.
• Advanced Domain Knowledge: Experience with data catalog, metadata, or governance ecosystems, or large-scale data infrastructure supporting mission-critical workloads.
• Cloud Infrastructure: Deep experience with public clouds (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and expertise in resource management and multi-tenancy in complex cloud environments.
• AI-Adjacent Systems: Experience building infrastructure that serves AI or agentic workloads, particularly around metadata, context quality, or governance.