Principal Engineer, Governance & Data Platform

Confluent; Tallahassee (FL); Remote; 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 schema and metadata governance across the Data Streaming Platform. You will own domain-level strategy, guiding multi-tenant infrastructure and core governance services from Confluent Cloud to Confluent Platform.

You will mentor engineers, drive architectural excellence, and collaborate with product and engineering leadership to balance technical depth with business impact for reliable

Qualifications

• Deep expertise leading architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems with company-level impact.
• Comprehensive knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, scalability, and cloud-native platforms.
• Working depth with streaming or event-driven architectures and related domains like metadata/governance.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, reduce systemic complexity, and forecast 3–5 year trends.
• Strong leadership presence to influence executives and stakeholders across teams.
• Execution-focused with a track record of turning vision into shipped, adopted outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive company-level technical strategy for governance systems, ensuring long-term innovation for schema and metadata infrastructure.
• Architect and evolve high-performance metadata management systems with low-latency lookups and strong consistency across engines.
• Design and evolve data protection capabilities—encryption, access control, and schema validation—throughout the platform.
• Build and maintain highly available, multi-tenant infrastructure for governance services at scale.
• Establish and evangelize engineering standards, patterns, and frameworks across the organization.
• Partner with executives, product management, and engineering leaders to align technical vision with business goals.
• Mentor senior and staff-level engineers to grow future technical leaders and foster open-source contributions.
• Contribute to open-source projects and represent Confluent externally through talks and thought leadership.

Skills

Technical leadership

Distributed systems

Streaming architectures

Cloud infrastructure

Open-source contribution

Executive influence

Job description

Confluent is seeking a Principal Engineer to shape the long-term architecture, scalability, and reliability of schema and metadata governance across the Data Streaming Platform. You will own domain-level strategy, guiding multi-tenant infrastructure and core governance services from Confluent Cloud to Confluent Platform.

You will mentor engineers, drive architectural excellence, and collaborate with product and engineering leadership to balance technical depth with business impact for reliable