Principal Engineer, Streaming Governance & Metadata

IBM Computing; Bellevue (WA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the long-term architecture and scalability of Confluent's schema governance platform, shaping strategy across streaming and metadata services. You’ll influence platform reliability and multi-tenant design while collaborating with executives and product teams.

You will mentor senior engineers, drive architectural excellence, and contribute to open-source initiatives, ensuring the platform remains scalable and robust for global customers.

Qualifications

• Must have led architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems with company-level impact.
• Knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, scalability, and cloud-native platforms.
• Experience with streaming architectures and data governance systems.

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 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.
• Mentor senior engineers and contribute to open-source projects.

Skills

Technical Strategy

Metadata Management

Distributed Systems

Platform Engineering

Open-Source & Community

Mentorship

Job description

IBM Software is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the long-term architecture and scalability of Confluent's schema governance platform, shaping strategy across streaming and metadata services. You’ll influence platform reliability and multi-tenant design while collaborating with executives and product teams.

You will mentor senior engineers, drive architectural excellence, and contribute to open-source initiatives, ensuring the platform remains scalable and robust for global customers.