Principal Engineer, Data Governance & Streaming

Confluent; Jackson (MS); On-site; USD 285,000 - 342,000; Full time

Job summary

Confluent's Data Streaming Platform requires a Principal Engineer to shape the long-term architecture, focusing on schema, metadata governance, and scalable governance services across Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform. You will own company-level domains and influence engineering and product strategy with autonomy in ambiguous spaces.

You will mentor senior engineers, drive critical governance initiatives, and collaborate with executives to align technical vision with business goals while

Qualifications

• Proven track record of leading the architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems.
• Comprehensive knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, scalability, and cloud-native platforms.
• Experience with streaming architectures and metadata/governance systems.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and influence stakeholders to drive architecture decisions.

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 — 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.

Skills

Deep Expertise

Distributed Systems Mastery

Streaming Architecture Fluency

Strategic Influence

Leadership Presence

Execution

Job description

Confluent's Data Streaming Platform requires a Principal Engineer to shape the long-term architecture, focusing on schema, metadata governance, and scalable governance services across Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform. You will own company-level domains and influence engineering and product strategy with autonomy in ambiguous spaces.

You will mentor senior engineers, drive critical governance initiatives, and collaborate with executives to align technical vision with business goals while