Senior Principal Engineer — Next-Gen Kafka Platform

IBM; Rochester (MN); On-site; USD 190,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Confluent is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer to own the multi-year strategy for the Background Plane, the backbone of Kafka-like systems. You will drive high-visibility initiatives across storage, orchestration, and reliability, influencing executives and partner teams at scale.

You will define architecture roadmaps, mentor senior engineers, and help shape the Next-Gen Kafka platform. This role combines technical leadership with hands-on design for a world-class data streaming platform.

Qualifications

• Proven ability to architect, build and operate mission-critical distributed systems at planetary scale.
• Deep insight into storage engines, distributed log stores, stream processing, replication or consensus protocols.
• Ability to articulate, execute and deliver complex multi-year architectural roadmaps across multi-disciplinary teams.
• Strong reasoning about race conditions, distributed concurrency, state machines, edge cases and backpressure.
• Establish measurable SLA/SLO metrics, durability targets, and automated recovery practices across global multi-tenant infra.
• Outstanding written and oral communication skills for exec leadership and cross-team alignment.
• A passion for mentorship and empowering staff/principal engineers to grow as leaders.

Responsibilities

• Define the multi-year technical strategy for the Background Plane and shape its role in the Next-Gen Kafka architecture.
• Lead high-ambiguity, high-visibility initiatives spanning storage, foreground serving engines, consensus layers, cloud infrastructure and SRE.
• Architect long-term technical vision and translate business objectives into distributed architectures and roadmaps.
• Drive cross-organizational consensus on contracts for data references, interfaces, and encryption models.
• Maintain global engineering standards for fault tolerance, chaos testing, observability, canary safety and incident mitigation.
• Serve as the definitive technical authority during architectural reviews, critical incidents, and complex trade-offs.
• Mentor senior engineers and represent the tech vision externally through talks, publications and open-source work.

Skills

Distributed systems

Streaming & storage

Strategic technical leadership

Rigorous problem-solving

SRE & reliability

Influential communication

Talent multiplier

Education

Master's Degree

Job description

Confluent is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer to own the multi-year strategy for the Background Plane, the backbone of Kafka-like systems. You will drive high-visibility initiatives across storage, orchestration, and reliability, influencing executives and partner teams at scale.

You will define architecture roadmaps, mentor senior engineers, and help shape the Next-Gen Kafka platform. This role combines technical leadership with hands-on design for a world-class data streaming platform.