Principal Engineer - Data Governance & Schema Platform

Confluent; Saint Paul (MN); Remote; USD 285,000 - 342,000; Full time

Job summary

Confluent is seeking a Principal Engineer to drive the long-term architecture of our Data Streaming Platform. You will shape governance, metadata, and schema systems at scale, partnering with product and platform teams across the company.

This remote role offers autonomy in ambiguous spaces, and opportunities to mentor engineers, contribute to open-source, and influence engineering practices for Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform.

Qualifications

• Experience leading architecture of large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, scalability.
• Experience with streaming or event-driven architectures.
• Ability to influence executives and manage cross-team initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive company-level technical strategy for governance systems.
• Architect metadata management with low-latency lookups and strong consistency.
• Design data protection capabilities including encryption and access control.
• Build and maintain highly available, multi-tenant governance infra.
• Establish engineering standards and architectural patterns.
• Collaborate with executives and engineering leaders to align technical vision.
• Mentor senior engineers and contribute to open-source.
• Contribute to open-source projects and represent Confluent externally.

Skills

Technical leadership

Distributed systems

Streaming architecture

Cloud-native

Executive influence

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Kubernetes

Job description

Confluent is seeking a Principal Engineer to drive the long-term architecture of our Data Streaming Platform. You will shape governance, metadata, and schema systems at scale, partnering with product and platform teams across the company.

This remote role offers autonomy in ambiguous spaces, and opportunities to mentor engineers, contribute to open-source, and influence engineering practices for Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform.