Senior Software Engineer - Confluent DevProd

About the role

Our team sits within the Developer Productivity (DevProd) organization and is responsible for ensuring that Confluent engineers can safely and efficiently build, test, and operate our cloud at scale. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will design, build, and operate internal platform services and tools that improve developer experience and overall engineering velocity.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate internal developer platform services — design secure, multi-tenant, and scalable services that integrate into existing DevProd systems (e.g., CI/CD, test infrastructure, developer portals), and own their reliability, performance, and monitoring.
• Improve pre-production and performance testing capabilities — model realistic workloads and stress scenarios, automate performance/scale/regression tests as part of CI/CD, and provide actionable, self-service reporting that helps teams quickly see where their services break or degrade.
• Explore and integrate AI-assisted workflows for developers — evaluate AI tools and frameworks, run data-driven experiments, and, where they add real value, productionize workflows such as triage assistants, anomaly detection over pre‑prod metrics, or intelligent test selection, with appropriate guardrails and visibility.
• Deliver projects end to end in a collaborative way — frame problems, write clear design docs, break work into milestones, drive implementation with your peers, and participate in rollout plans that include documentation, training, and feedback loops with partner teams.
• Contribute to team and engineering culture — participate in on-call and incident response for the components you own, write clear documentation, mentor junior engineers through design and code reviews, and help evolve best practices for DevProd and platform engineering.

Requirements

Preferred Education Master's Degree Required Technical & Professional Expertise Education & Experience – BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related field (or equivalent experience), and at least 5 years of professional software engineering experience building and operating cloud services, platforms, or large-scale distributed systems.

• Technical & Platform Depth – Strong fundamentals in distributed systems and reliability; proficiency in at least one statically typed language (e.g., Java, Go) plus a scripting language (e.g., Python); experience with DevProd/DevOps tooling such as CI/CD, containers, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Execution & Ownership – Demonstrated ability to independently drive projects from design through rollout, breaking work into milestones, managing risk, and delivering high-quality outcomes on time.
• Collaboration & Leadership – Strong written and verbal communication skills; experience mentoring other engineers, leading design and code reviews, and influencing cross-functional stakeholders in a platform setting.
• Operational Excellence – Proven track record owning services in production or critical pre‑prod environments, including on-call, incident response, and postmortems, with a strong bias towards automation to reduce toil and improve reliability.
• AI Awareness – Practical experience or strong interest in integrating AI/ML or LLM-based capabilities into developer or platform workflows, along with an understanding of how to design sensible guardrails and instrumentation for safe use.

Qualifications

Leading-Edge Technologies: Experience with designing, developing, and delivering software solutions using leading-edge technologies, including back-end and front-end development, and DevOps engineering.

• Agile Collaboration: Experience working in an Agile environment, collaborating with stakeholders to understand requirements and deliver high-quality software solutions.
• Automated CI/CD Pipelines: Experience contributing to automated CI/CD pipelines, ensuring seamless integration and delivery of software solutions.