Senior Principal Architect - Real-Time Data Platform

International Business Machines Corporation; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 290,000; Full time

Job summary

Confluent is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer to define the multi-year strategy for the Next-Gen Kafka Background Plane. This IC role has wide scope, spanning cloud storage, consensus layers, and reliability.

You will lead high-ambiguity initiatives, mentor senior engineers, and drive architectural contracts across the org. You will champion standards for fault tolerance, observability, and scalable, low-latency data streaming for enterprise customers, while aligning with executive leadership

Qualifications

• Proven track record architecting/operating mission-critical distributed systems at scale.
• Deep knowledge of storage engines, log stores, stream processing, replication, or consensus.
• Ability to define and drive multi-year architectural roadmaps.
• Strong reasoning about concurrency, edge cases, and backpressure.
• Experience establishing SLA/SLOs and automated recovery practices.
• Clear, executive-level written and verbal communication.
• Mentorship and leadership of senior engineers.

Responsibilities

• Architect multi-year strategy for the Background Plane and align with product goals.
• Design and optimize high-scale processing platforms and workflows.
• Own correctness model for data/metadata workloads across systems.
• Ensure scale with sub-millisecond foreground latencies.
• Lead architectural consensus across organizations and orchestrate roadmaps.
• Define global engineering standards for fault tolerance and observability.
• Serve as senior technical authority during reviews and incidents.
• Mentor and sponsor senior staff engineers and external speakers.

Skills

Distributed systems

Streaming & storage

Strategic leadership

Problem solving

Quality & SRE

Communication

Talent multiplier

Job description

Confluent is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer to define the multi-year strategy for the Next-Gen Kafka Background Plane. This IC role has wide scope, spanning cloud storage, consensus layers, and reliability.

You will lead high-ambiguity initiatives, mentor senior engineers, and drive architectural contracts across the org. You will champion standards for fault tolerance, observability, and scalable, low-latency data streaming for enterprise customers, while aligning with executive leadership