Remote Principal Data Governance Engineer

Confluent; Augusta (ME); On-site; USD 285,000 - 342,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Bonus

Job summary

Confluent is seeking a Principal Engineer to shape long-term architecture for governance across the Data Streaming Platform. You will lead schema management, metadata governance, and data policy enforcement at scale, partnering with cross-functional teams to deliver reliable, scalable solutions.

The role emphasizes autonomy in ambiguous spaces, influence with executives, and contributions to open-source communities while supporting Confluent Cloud and Platform initiatives.

Qualifications

• A proven track record of leading the architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems with company-level impact.
• Comprehensive knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, scalability, and cloud-native platforms.
• Working depth with streaming or event-driven architectures, and familiarity with adjacent domains such as schema management, data catalogs, or metadata/governance systems.

Responsibilities

• Technical Strategy & Leadership: Define and drive company-level technical strategy for critical governance systems, ensuring long-term innovation for schema and metadata infrastructure.
• Metadata Architecture & Lifecycle Management: Architect and evolve high-performance metadata management systems that support low-latency lookups, strong consistency guarantees, and coherent behavior across streaming and processing engines.
• Data Policy & Governance Systems: Design and evolve data protection capabilities — including encryption, access control, and schema validation — enforced consistently across the platform.
• Platform Engineering: Build and maintain highly available, multi-tenant infrastructure for governance services, ensuring the platform is optimized for scalability, reliability, and resilience.
• Architectural Excellence: Establish and evangelize engineering standards, architectural patterns, and technical frameworks adopted across the organization.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with executives, product management, and engineering leaders across the platform to align technical vision with business objectives — working across team boundaries to build consensus on shared architecture decisions you don't have direct authority over.
• Mentorship & Culture: Mentor senior and staff-level engineers, growing future technical leaders and shaping a culture of engineering excellence and open-source contribution.
• Open-Source & External Representation: Contribute to relevant open-source projects and represent Confluent externally through technical talks and thought leadership.

Skills

Distributed Systems

Cloud Infrastructure

Streaming Architecture

Leadership

Execution

Job description

Confluent is seeking a Principal Engineer to shape long-term architecture for governance across the Data Streaming Platform. You will lead schema management, metadata governance, and data policy enforcement at scale, partnering with cross-functional teams to deliver reliable, scalable solutions.

The role emphasizes autonomy in ambiguous spaces, influence with executives, and contributions to open-source communities while supporting Confluent Cloud and Platform initiatives.