Principal Engineer: Stream Governance & Metadata

IBM; Tucson (AZ); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Confluent is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the architecture and delivery of its governance systems for real-time data streams. You will shape schema management, metadata governance, and cross-team alignment across the platform.

The role emphasizes autonomy in ambiguity and strong influence with executives. Ideal candidates bring deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and open-source collaboration, with a track record of delivering scalable governance solutions

Qualifications

• Proven track record of leading the architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience with data catalog, metadata governance, and data platforms.
• Deep knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, scalability in cloud-native settings.
• Ability to influence executives and drive cross-functional alignment across teams.
• Experience contributing to and shaping open-source projects.

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.
• Design and evolve data protection capabilities, including encryption, access control, and schema validation.
• Build and maintain highly available, multi-tenant infrastructure for governance services.
• Establish and evangelize engineering standards, architectural patterns, and technical frameworks.
• Partner with executives, product management, and engineering leaders to align technical vision with business goals.
• Mentor senior and staff engineers to grow technical leadership and engineering culture.
• Open-source contributions and external representation through talks and thought leadership.

Skills

Distributed systems

Architecture leadership

Schema governance

Cloud platforms

Data governance

Mentorship

Open-source contributions

Education

Master's Degree

Job description

Confluent is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the architecture and delivery of its governance systems for real-time data streams. You will shape schema management, metadata governance, and cross-team alignment across the platform.

The role emphasizes autonomy in ambiguity and strong influence with executives. Ideal candidates bring deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and open-source collaboration, with a track record of delivering scalable governance solutions