Principal Data Governance Engineer (Remote)

Confluent; Dover (DE); Remote; USD 285,000 - 342,000; Full time

Job summary

Confluent is hiring a Principal Engineer to shape the long-term architecture of its schema and metadata governance systems. You will own company-level domains, influence platform strategy, and drive highly available, multi-tenant infrastructure across Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform.

You will mentor senior engineers, contribute to open-source initiatives, and collaborate with executives to align technical vision with business goals, while delivering scalable, reliable governance services.

Qualifications

• Proven track record of leading the architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience with data catalogs, metadata governance, or related ecosystems.
• Experience with cloud providers and multi-tenant architectures.
• Ability to influence across executives and teams.
• Strong problem-solving and execution focus.
• Open-source contributions are a plus.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.

Skills

Distributed Systems

Architecture Leadership

Cloud-Native Platforms

Streaming / Event-Driven

Executive Communication

Mentorship

Job description

Confluent is hiring a Principal Engineer to shape the long-term architecture of its schema and metadata governance systems. You will own company-level domains, influence platform strategy, and drive highly available, multi-tenant infrastructure across Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform.

You will mentor senior engineers, contribute to open-source initiatives, and collaborate with executives to align technical vision with business goals, while delivering scalable, reliable governance services.