Senior Principal Engineer, Kafka Core & Streaming Engine

IBM; Armonk (NY); On-site; USD 260,000 - 380,000; Full time

Job summary

Confluent seeks a Senior Principal Engineer to define the multi-year strategy for the Background Plane and to drive pivotal architectural decisions across cloud storage, serving engines, and consensus layers.

You will lead high-ambiguity initiatives spanning multiple domains, mentor staff engineers, and represent Confluent's technical vision through external contributions and leadership. This is an individual contributor role with company-wide impact.

Qualifications

• Experience architecting distributed systems at planetary scale.
• Deep expertise in storage engines, log stores, or consensus protocols.
• Proven ability to craft multi-year architectural roadmaps.
• Ability to reason about race conditions and backpressure in large systems.
• Experience delivering reliability, SLA/SLO targets, and observability.
• Strong communication for executive audiences.

Responsibilities

• Architect multi-year strategy for the Background Plane.
• Design and optimize high-scale processing platforms.
• Ensure end-to-end correctness across data workflows.
• Scale architectures to accommodate growth and latency goals.
• Lead cross-organizational consensus on contracts and interfaces.
• Uphold operational excellence with fault tolerance and chaos testing.
• Act as senior technical authority in reviews and incidents.
• Mentor and sponsor senior engineers and contribute externally.

Skills

Distributed Systems Mastery

Streaming & Storage Expertise

Strategic Technical Leadership

Rigorous Problem-Solving

Quality & SRE Rigor

Influential Communication

Talent Multiplier

Education

Master's Degree

Job description

Confluent seeks a Senior Principal Engineer to define the multi-year strategy for the Background Plane and to drive pivotal architectural decisions across cloud storage, serving engines, and consensus layers.

You will lead high-ambiguity initiatives spanning multiple domains, mentor staff engineers, and represent Confluent's technical vision through external contributions and leadership. This is an individual contributor role with company-wide impact.