Senior Software Engineer II, Confluent Secure Compute

About the Role

Confluent is on a mission to make it as easy as possible for anyone to use our products, including Kafka, to build their next killer streaming application. We are looking for great engineers to join our world-class team that is passionate about building and running large-scale, multi-tenant distributed systems for customers who expect very high availability.

As a senior backend software engineer, you will work on diverse and complex challenges such as building foundational cloud frameworks and services that power all components of the Confluent Cloud platform. You will help create a new multi-tenant, multi-cloud, polyglot, cloud-native compute substrate to enable new business opportunities across Confluent Cloud (including Connect, Apache Flink, Kafka, and more).

You will think strategically and drive end-to-end technical delivery—from customer experience to scaling internal operations. You will leverage your expertise in cloud-native, large-scale distributed systems to elevate our platform, ensuring key operational aspects like availability, reliability, performance, monitoring, emergency response, capacity planning, and disaster recovery are robust. Your work will ensure a highly-available, resilient, and secure offering that our largest customers can rely on.

Responsibilities

• Own and lead the design and implementation of complex backend services and systems in a cloud-native, microservices-based environment.
• Make architecture and technical decisions that balance reliability, scalability, performance, and operability, and clearly communicate the tradeoffs.
• Drive projects end-to-end: from requirements and design through implementation, rollout, and ongoing operation in production.
• Improve service reliability and operations by defining SLOs/SLAs, strengthening observability, and participating in on-call as needed.
• Collaborate across teams to define APIs, integration points, and data models that keep the platform coherent and evolvable.
• Identify and drive platform and productivity improvements (tooling, automation, process) that raise the bar for the broader engineering organization.
• Mentor and support other engineers through code reviews, design reviews, and technical guidance, helping grow the team’s capabilities.
• Contribute to a culture of continuous improvement, inclusive collaboration, and high technical standards.

Requirements

• 5+ years of industry experience designing, building, and supporting backend systems in production with a solid grasp of good software engineering practices such as code reviews, deep focus on quality, and documentation.
• Strong knowledge of Python runtime environments (virtual environments, package management, and interpreter configurations).
• Strong programming and algorithmic skills. Proficiency in a major programming language, e.g., Python, Go, C/C++, Java, etc.
• Strong experience running services in a public cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including containers and orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) and modern cloud-native technologies.
• Expertise in other language runtimes/VMs (JVM/WASM, etc.) is a big plus.
• A track record of technical leadership: driving projects, influencing architecture, and coordinating work across multiple engineers or teams.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to align stakeholders, explain complex ideas clearly, and drive decisions.
• Experience with observability and operational excellence (metrics, logging, tracing, incident response, and postmortems).
• Education in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven track record of leading the delivery of large-scale, highly available, low-latency, high-quality systems.
• Deep hands-on technical expertise in large-scale systems engineering, distributed systems, and container sandboxing technologies.
• On-call experience handling critical systems.

This job can be performed from anywhere in the US.