Senior Principal Architect, Real-Time Kafka Systems

IBM

Boston (KY)

On-site

USD 180,000 - 240,000

Full time

3 days ago

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Job summary

Confluent is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer to define and drive the multi-year strategy for the Background Plane of the Next-Gen Kafka platform.

You will lead architecture across cloud storage, consensus layers, and site reliability, mentoring engineers and aligning teams to a shared technical vision. This individual contributor role offers executive-level impact within a global engineering organization.

Qualifications

Master's degree required; extensive experience with distributed systems.
Proven track record architecting and operating mission-critical platforms.
Strong leadership and cross-functional collaboration.

Responsibilities

Define the multi-year technical strategy for the Background Plane and align roadmaps.
Design and optimize core platform capabilities like scheduling, coordination, autoscaling.
Ensure correctness of data and metadata workflows under high concurrency.
Scale to handle growth in partitions, throughput, storage, and latency.
Lead architectural consensus across teams and oversee production rollout.
Set engineering standards for fault tolerance, observability, and incident response.
Act as senior technical authority during reviews and incidents.
Mentor senior engineers and represent the vision in external venues.