Senior Principal Engineer, Real-Time Kafka Platform

IBM; Tucson (AZ); On-site; USD 210,000 - 290,000; Full time

Job summary

Confluent seeks a Senior Principal Engineer to define and drive the multi-year Background Plane strategy within the Next-Gen Kafka architecture. This individual contributor role operates with executive-level scope, guiding initiatives across cloud storage, engines, consensus layers, and site reliability engineering.

You will mentor senior engineers, influence architecture decisions, and represent Confluent's technical vision externally through talks and open-source contributions.

Qualifications

• Expertise architecting distributed systems at planetary scale.
• In-depth knowledge of storage engines, log stores, replication, or consensus protocols.
• Ability to articulate and drive multi-year architectural roadmaps across orgs.
• Strong problem-solving in race conditions, concurrency, and backpressure.

Responsibilities

• Define long-term technical strategy for the Background Plane and multi-year roadmaps.
• Lead high-ambition, cross-functional initiatives spanning storage, engines, and control planes.
• Spearhead architectural contracts and production rollout across teams.
• Raise engineering standards for fault tolerance, chaos testing, and observability.

Skills

Distributed Systems

Streaming

Strategic Leadership

Problem-Solving

SRE & Observability

Communication

Mentorship

Education

Master's Degree

Job description

Confluent seeks a Senior Principal Engineer to define and drive the multi-year Background Plane strategy within the Next-Gen Kafka architecture. This individual contributor role operates with executive-level scope, guiding initiatives across cloud storage, engines, consensus layers, and site reliability engineering.

You will mentor senior engineers, influence architecture decisions, and represent Confluent's technical vision externally through talks and open-source contributions.