Principal Engineer, Data Governance & Streaming (Remote)

Confluent; Columbia (SC); On-site; USD 285,000 - 342,000; Full time

Job summary

Confluent is seeking a Principal Engineer to shape the long-term architecture, scalability, and reliability of its schema and metadata governance across the Data Streaming Platform. You will drive core layers, cross-team collaboration, and multi-tenant infrastructure to enable real-time, compliant data workflows.

You will own company-level domains, set direction for major initiatives, and influence engineering practices and product strategy, balancing technical depth with business impact in a

Qualifications

• Proven track record leading architecture of large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep knowledge of fault tolerance and cloud-native platforms.
• Experience with data catalogs, metadata governance is 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 — 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

Distributed Systems

Streaming Architecture

Technical Leadership

Strategic Influence

Execution Excellence

Job description

Confluent is seeking a Principal Engineer to shape the long-term architecture, scalability, and reliability of its schema and metadata governance across the Data Streaming Platform. You will drive core layers, cross-team collaboration, and multi-tenant infrastructure to enable real-time, compliant data workflows.

You will own company-level domains, set direction for major initiatives, and influence engineering practices and product strategy, balancing technical depth with business impact in a