Senior Principal Engineer — Kafka Platform & Scale

IBM; Poughkeepsie (AR); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Confluent is a leader in real-time data streaming and distributed systems at planetary scale. You will define and drive the multi-year technical strategy for the Background Plane, guiding architecture across cloud storage, consensus layers, and reliability.

This individual-contributor role operates with executive-level scope and a global impact. As a Senior Principal Engineer, you will coordinate across teams to ensure end-to-end correctness, scale, and operational excellence, mentoring staff

Qualifications

• Distributed systems at planetary scale with storage engines, replication, or consensus protocols.
• Apache Kafka internals or equivalent high-throughput streaming systems.
• Ability to articulate and deliver multi-year architectural roadmaps across multi-disciplinary teams.
• Fluency in reasoning about race conditions, distributed concurrency, and backpressure.

Responsibilities

• Define the multi-year technical strategy for the Background Plane.
• Lead high-ambiguity, high-visibility initiatives spanning cloud storage, control planes, and reliability.
• Architect world-class distributed architectures and engineering roadmaps.
• Sponsor and mentor senior engineers to grow leadership across the org.
• Represent Confluent's technical vision externally through talks and publications.

Skills

Distributed Systems

Streaming & Storage

Strategic Technical Leadership

Rigorous Problem-Solving

Quality & SRE Rigor

Influential Communication

Talent Multiplier

Chaos engineering

Traffic replay

Deterministic testing

Multi-cloud deployment

Education

Master's Degree

Job description

Confluent is a leader in real-time data streaming and distributed systems at planetary scale. You will define and drive the multi-year technical strategy for the Background Plane, guiding architecture across cloud storage, consensus layers, and reliability.

This individual-contributor role operates with executive-level scope and a global impact. As a Senior Principal Engineer, you will coordinate across teams to ensure end-to-end correctness, scale, and operational excellence, mentoring staff