Principal Engineer, Data Governance & Streaming (Remote)

Confluent; Annapolis (MD); On-site; USD 285,000 - 342,000; Full time

Job summary

Confluent is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the long-term architecture, scalability, and reliability of the Data Streaming Platform’s governance systems. This role focuses on schema management, metadata enforcement, and cross-team integration across Confluent Cloud and Platform.

You will own company-level domains, set strategic directions, and influence engineering practices while balancing technical depth with business impact to ensure scalable and reliable governance services.

Qualifications

• Proven track record leading architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong experience with fault tolerance, consistency, and scalable cloud-native platforms.
• Experience with streaming or event-driven architectures and metadata/governance systems.
• Ability to influence executives and stakeholders while driving architecture decisions.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive company-level technical strategy for governance systems.
• Architect and evolve metadata management with low-latency lookups and strong consistency.
• Design data protection capabilities including encryption and access controls.
• Build and maintain highly available, multi-tenant governance infrastructure.
• Establish and evangelize engineering standards and architectural patterns across the org.
• Mentor senior engineers and contribute to open-source initiatives.

Skills

Distributed systems

Streaming architecture

Executive leadership

Cloud-native

Open-source

Tools

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

Confluent is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the long-term architecture, scalability, and reliability of the Data Streaming Platform’s governance systems. This role focuses on schema management, metadata enforcement, and cross-team integration across Confluent Cloud and Platform.

You will own company-level domains, set strategic directions, and influence engineering practices while balancing technical depth with business impact to ensure scalable and reliable governance services.