Principal Engineer - Remote Data Governance & Streaming

Confluent; Frankfort (KY); 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 systems. You will own governance domains, steering initiatives across Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform with autonomy in ambiguous spaces.

You will lead critical governance infrastructure, ensure low-latency lookups and strong consistency, and collaborate with executives and engineering leaders to drive architectural decisions at scale.

Qualifications

• Deep expertise leading architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, and cloud-native platforms.
• Hands-on experience with streaming/event-driven architectures and data governance domains.
• Ability to influence at executive levels and balance technical depth with business impact.
• Leadership presence with ability to guide multiple teams and stakeholders.
• Proven ability to translate high-level vision into concrete technical delivery.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive company-level technical strategy for governance systems and metadata infrastructure.
• Architect and evolve metadata management systems with low-latency lookups and strong consistency.
• Design data protection capabilities including encryption, access control, and schema validation.
• Build and maintain highly available, multi-tenant governance infrastructure.
• Establish engineering standards and architectural patterns across the org.
• Collaborate with executives, product, and engineering leaders to align vision and decisions.
• Mentor senior engineers and contribute to open-source initiatives.
• Represent Confluent externally through talks and thought leadership.

Skills

Deep Expertise

Distributed Systems

Streaming Architecture

Strategic Influence

Leadership

Execution

Job description

Confluent is seeking a Principal Engineer to shape the long-term architecture, scalability, and reliability of its schema and metadata governance systems. You will own governance domains, steering initiatives across Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform with autonomy in ambiguous spaces.

You will lead critical governance infrastructure, ensure low-latency lookups and strong consistency, and collaborate with executives and engineering leaders to drive architectural decisions at scale.