(Confluent) Senior Principal Engineer II, Kafka

Your Role And Responsibilities

• Architect Multi-Year Strategy: Establish the long-term technical vision for the Background Plane, translating strategic business and product objectives into world-class distributed architectures, multi-year engineering roadmaps, and high-impact investment priorities.
• Engineer High-Scale Processing Platforms: Design, build, and optimize core platform capabilities including distributed scheduling, task coordination, isolation guarantees, elastic autoscaling, sophisticated backpressure, and cross-dependency execution workflows.
• Guarantee End-to-End Correctness: Own the mathematical and operational correctness model for all data and metadata workflows (compaction, rewriting, retention, segment lifecycle, object GC), building bulletproof safety guarantees under extreme concurrency, partial network failures, and degraded dependencies.
• Scale Without Bounds: Ensure the Background Plane seamlessly accommodates hyper-growth in partition counts, throughput, storage footprint, and background lag without compromising sub-millisecond foreground latencies.
• Drive Cross-Organizational Consensus: Spearhead architectural contracts across organizations—spanning data references, metadata interfaces, object life cycles, encryption models, and task schedulers—leading initiatives from initial framing to global production rollout.
• Raise Operational Excellence: Define and enforce global engineering standards for fault tolerance, chaos testing, deep observability, canary safety, and incident mitigation, continually driving down systemic risk across reliability, cost, and velocity.
• Serve as Senior Authority: Act as the definitive technical authority during critical architectural reviews, high-severity incident responses, and complex technical trade-off discussions spanning product, infrastructure, and security.
• Elevate Engineering Culture: Sponsor and mentor senior and staff engineers across the organization while representing Confluent's technical vision externally through keynotes, research publications, and open-source contributions.

Preferred Education

Master's Degree Required

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• Distributed Systems Mastery: Proven track record of architecting, building, and operating mission-critical distributed systems at planetary scale, with deep expertise in storage engines, distributed log stores, stream processing, replication, or consensus protocols.
• Streaming & Storage Expertise: Deep insight into Apache Kafka internals (storage semantics, log compaction, tiered storage, segment indexing) or equivalent high-throughput streaming systems.
• Strategic Technical Leadership: Demonstrated capability to articulate, execute, and deliver complex multi-year architectural roadmaps across multi-disciplinary engineering organizations.
• Rigorous Problem-Solving: Exceptional fluency in reasoning about race conditions, distributed concurrency, state machine transitions, edge-case failures, and backpressure mechanisms.
• Quality & SRE Rigor: Proven ability to establish measurable SLA/SLO metrics, durability targets, and automated recovery practices across global multi-tenant infrastructure fleets.
• Influential Communication: Outstanding written and oral communication skills, with an ability to distill highly technical concepts for executive leadership and forge cross-team alignment through trust and expertise.
• Talent Multiplier: A passion for mentorship, talent development, and empowering staff/principal engineers to reach their full leadership potential.

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Log-structured storage formats, custom storage engines, cloud object stores, or large-scale data re-writing pipelines.
• Fault-tolerant object lifecycle strategies designed to prevent data leakage, orphaned resources, or premature deletion.
• Chaos engineering, production traffic replay platforms, deterministic simulation testing, and large-scale load generation.
• Multi-cloud, multi-region deployment topologies across AWS, GCP, and Azure.