Principal Engineer: Data Governance & Streaming Platform

Confluent; Austin (TX); Remote; USD 285,000 - 342,000; Full time

Job summary

Confluent is seeking a Principal Engineer for its Data Streaming Platform, focusing on schema and metadata governance. You will shape long-term architecture, ensure reliability and scalability, and drive multi-tenant infrastructure across Confluent Cloud and Platform.

You will own core governance domains, set technical direction, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product and leadership to balance technical depth with business goals.

Qualifications

• Proven track record leading architecture of large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep knowledge of streaming architectures and data governance.
• Experience with cloud-native platforms and multi-tenant infrastructure.
• Ability to influence executives and drive cross-team alignment.
• Strong mentoring and leadership of senior engineers.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive company-level technical strategy for governance systems.
• Architect metadata management with low-latency lookups and strong consistency.
• Design data protection, access control, and schema validation across the platform.
• Build highly available, multi-tenant governance services.
• Set engineering standards and patterns across the org.
• Collaborate with executives, product, and engineering to align architecture.
• Mentor senior engineers and foster a culture of excellence.
• Contribute to open-source and represent Confluent externally.

Skills

Technical leadership

Distributed systems

Streaming architectures

Cloud-native platforms

Strategic influence

Mentorship

Open-source

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Metadata tooling

Job description

Confluent is seeking a Principal Engineer for its Data Streaming Platform, focusing on schema and metadata governance. You will shape long-term architecture, ensure reliability and scalability, and drive multi-tenant infrastructure across Confluent Cloud and Platform.

You will own core governance domains, set technical direction, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product and leadership to balance technical depth with business goals.