Senior Engineering Manager - Experience Foundations - Confluent

About the role

We're seeking a hands-on Senior Engineering Manager to join our Experience Foundations team. This team owns critical TEAR (Trusted Experiences Access & Revenue) domains including Security UI, Networking UI, and Billing UI, as well as the shared experience foundations infrastructure (formerly UIF/UI Foundations team).

Responsibilities

• Elevate the impact of all UI engineers across multiple product teams (Governance, Flink, Kafka, Connect, Tableflow)
• Take a depth-first, hands-on approach to understanding systems and unblocking teams
• Drive the evolution of Experience Foundations infrastructure from UI-only to supporting the entire Experience organization
• Partner with the existing Engineering Manager to shape and execute the foundations roadmap
• Own PM and Design partnerships for Security, Networking, and Billing domains
• Bridge technical and product perspectives to drive aligned outcomes
• Translate domain complexity into clear execution plans
• Challenge product specs when necessary to ensure technical feasibility
• Partner with product teams across the portfolio to ensure patterns meet their needs
• Communicate progress, risks, and trade-offs transparently to senior leadership
• Collaborate with existing engineering leadership to build cohesive team strategy
• Mentor and develop engineers across multiple disciplines and experience levels
• Foster a culture of ownership, excellence, and continuous improvement
• Create leverage by empowering engineers with patterns, tools, and knowledge
• Build strong connections between Experience Foundations and application teams
• Champion developer productivity through AI tooling adoption, test automation, and improved engineering processes

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience leading software engineering teams
• Strong hands-on technical background with ability to dive deep into complex systems
• Strong understanding of modern web development (React, TypeScript, component design systems)
• Proven ability to distill complex technical domains into clear patterns and best practices
• Track record of elevating team capabilities through mentorship and knowledge sharing
• Demonstrated success partnering with Product and Design to drive execution
• Experience managing or collaborating closely with other engineering managers
• Experience managing multiple product areas or technical domains simultaneously
• Experience managing managers or leading leaders
• Domain knowledge in at least one TEAR area: Security (RBAC, SSO, BYOK, encryption), Networking (VPC, PrivateLink, routing), or Billing/Payments (subscription models, usage tracking)
• Experience evolving platform teams to serve broader organizational needs
• Proficient with or highly curious about AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, etc.)
• Track record of driving developer productivity improvements through tooling, automation, or process innovation