Senior Principal Engineer: Real-Time Data Platform

International Business Machines Corporation

Tucson (AZ)

On-site

USD 180,000 - 240,000

Full time

6 days ago

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Job summary

Confluent is seeking an extraordinary Senior Principal Engineer to define and drive the multi-year technical strategy for the Background Plane within the Next-Gen Kafka architecture. This is an individual contributor role with executive-level scope, spanning cloud storage, control planes, and site reliability engineering.

You will mentor staff engineers and lead high-visibility initiatives across organizations.

Qualifications

Experience architecting distributed systems at planetary scale.
Deep knowledge of storage engines, logs, replication, or consensus protocols.
Ability to translate business goals into multi-year engineering roadmaps.
Strong problem-solving skills for complex, high-concurrency environments.

Responsibilities

Define the multi-year technical strategy for the Background Plane and align with executive stakeholders.
Design and optimize core platform capabilities like scheduling, coordination, autoscaling, and backpressure.
Ensure correctness and safety across data workflows under failure and high concurrency.
Scale architectures to accommodate rapid growth in partitions, throughput, and storage.
Lead architectural contracts across teams and drive global production rollout.
Establish and enforce engineering standards for fault tolerance, observability, and incident response.
Serve as technical authority during reviews and incident responses, guiding trade-offs.
Mentor senior engineers and represent the company’s vision in public forums.