Principal Engineer, Governance — Remote & Equity

Confluent; Concord (NH); Remote; USD 285,000 - 342,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Bonus

Job summary

Confluent is seeking a Principal Engineer to shape the long-term architecture of its schema and metadata governance across the Data Streaming Platform. You will own critical governance services, drive reliability at scale, and influence platform-wide decisions with autonomy in ambiguous spaces.

The role emphasizes leadership, open-source contribution, and collaboration with product and executive teams to balance technical depth with business impact.

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in building large-scale distributed systems with trusted data governance.
• Strong knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, and cloud-native platforms.
• Experience with streaming architectures, data catalogs, or metadata/governance ecosystems.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive company-level technical strategy for governance systems.
• Architect and evolve high-performance metadata management with low-latency lookups.
• Design data protection, encryption, access control, and schema validation across the platform.
• Build and maintain highly available, multi-tenant governance infrastructure.
• Set architectural standards and evangelize engineering practices across teams.
• Collaborate with executives and product to align technical vision with business goals.
• Mentor senior engineers and contribute to open-source.

Job description

Confluent is seeking a Principal Engineer to shape the long-term architecture of its schema and metadata governance across the Data Streaming Platform. You will own critical governance services, drive reliability at scale, and influence platform-wide decisions with autonomy in ambiguous spaces.

The role emphasizes leadership, open-source contribution, and collaboration with product and executive teams to balance technical depth with business impact.