Principal Engineer I, Governance
Shapes the architecture and technical strategy for Confluent’s distributed schema, metadata, and governance systems across its streaming platform. The role requires deep distributed-systems expertise, streaming architecture fluency, and the ability to influence company-wide technical direction.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Define and drive company-level technical strategy for critical governance systems, including schema and metadata infrastructure.
- Architect and evolve high-performance metadata management systems with low-latency lookups, strong consistency, and coherent behavior across streaming and processing engines.
- Design and evolve data protection capabilities, including encryption, access control, and schema validation, enforced consistently across the platform.
- Build and maintain highly available, multi-tenant governance infrastructure optimized for scalability, reliability, and resilience.
- Establish and evangelize engineering standards, architectural patterns, and technical frameworks across the organization.
- Partner with executives, product management, and engineering leaders to align technical vision with business objectives and build consensus across teams.
- Mentor senior and staff-level engineers and help develop future technical leaders.
- Contribute to relevant open-source projects and represent the company through technical talks and thought leadership.
Requirements
- Proven track record leading the architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems with company-level impact.
- Comprehensive knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, scalability, and cloud-native platforms.
- Working depth with streaming or event-driven architectures.
- Familiarity with schema management, data catalogs, or metadata and governance systems.
- Ability to navigate ambiguity, reduce systemic complexity, and design systems for the next 3–5 years.
- Strong ability to influence executives and stakeholders while fostering collaboration across multiple teams.
- Demonstrated ability to move from high-level vision to detailed technical implementation and delivery.
Nice-to-Haves
- Open-source contributions or experience driving initiatives from the ground up.
- Experience with data catalog, metadata, or governance ecosystems, or large-scale data infrastructure supporting mission-critical workloads.
- Deep experience with public clouds such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
- Expertise in resource management and multi-tenancy in complex cloud environments.
- Experience building infrastructure for AI or agentic workloads, particularly metadata, context quality, or governance systems.
Compensation
- Annual salary: $285,000–$342,000
Skills
Distributed Systems, Streaming Architectures, Event-Driven Architecture, Metadata Management, Schema Management, Data Governance, Encryption, Access Control, AWS, Azure, GCP, Multi-Tenancy, Fault Tolerance, Cloud-Native Platforms, Open Source
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