Principal Engineer, Governance & Metadata — Remote

Confluent; Springfield (IL); Remote; USD 285,000 - 342,000; Full time

Job summary

Confluent is seeking a Principal Engineer to shape long-term architecture for schema and metadata governance within the Data Streaming Platform. You will drive governance systems, ensure high availability, and influence platform-level decisions across Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform.

You will lead multi-tenant infrastructure efforts, champion scalable, secure data policies, and collaborate with product and engineering leaders to balance technical depth with business impact.

Qualifications

• Proven track record of leading the architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, and cloud-native platforms.
• Experience with streaming or event-driven architectures and metadata/governance domains.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive company-level technical strategy for governance systems.
• Architect and evolve high-performance metadata management with low-latency lookups.
• Design and evolve data protection capabilities including encryption and access control.
• Build and maintain multi-tenant infrastructure for governance services.
• Establish and evangelize engineering standards and patterns across the org.
• Collaborate with executives, product, and engineering leaders to align vision.
• Mentor senior engineers and contribute to a culture of excellence and openness.
• Contribute to open-source projects and represent Confluent externally.

Skills

Technical strategy

Distributed systems

Streaming architecture

Strategic influence

Leadership presence

Execution

Job description

Confluent is seeking a Principal Engineer to shape long-term architecture for schema and metadata governance within the Data Streaming Platform. You will drive governance systems, ensure high availability, and influence platform-level decisions across Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform.

You will lead multi-tenant infrastructure efforts, champion scalable, secure data policies, and collaborate with product and engineering leaders to balance technical depth with business impact.