Senior Engineering Manager, Flink Control Plane

About the Role:

The Flink Platform team is at the forefront of building a robust, serverless control plane for Confluent’s fully managed Flink offering. As the Senior Engineering Manager, you will lead a high-impact team of approximately 10 engineers—including two Staff-level individual contributors—responsible for the "brain" of our streaming service.

You will own the customer-facing Flink REST API and Gateway, the Kubernetes operators that orchestrate Flink job lifecycles (submission, scaling, recovery), and the declarative API server that backs them – the stack every Flink customer interaction flows through. Your team is responsible for multi-tenant isolation, end-to-end reliability, and the integration points between Confluent's global control plane and the regional Flink data plane.

This is a critical leadership role where you will balance deep technical strategy–driving architectural excellence and reliability–with a strong focus on people leadership, specifically growing a talented group of senior engineers into the next generation of Staff-level leaders.

What You Will Do:

• Vision & Execution: Own the overall roadmap and execution for the Flink Control Plane. Define the strategy for job orchestration (submission, scaling, recovery) and serverless resource management.
• Architectural Leadership: Lead the ongoing migration of the control plane onto Confluent's latest platform foundations and drive major component refactors in service of reliability, security, and scale. You will "see around corners" – making the right bets on architecture today so the platform stays resilient as Flink usage grows by orders of magnitude.
• Engineering Excellence: Work with engineering teams and product management on critical aspects of product definition, architectural design, and delivery. Influence the overall domain health and operational hygiene for the platform.
• Scale & Performance: Drive the control plane's evolution to support 10x growth in compute pools, statements, and tenants per region. Lead initiatives that eliminate hotspots in the metadata and orchestration layers so customer-facing operations remain fast and predictable under load.
• People Development: Manage and coach a diverse team. Your primary mission is to mentor junior and mid-level developers, providing them with the architectural context and leadership skills to reach Staff levels.
• Collaboration: Work closely with engineering leadership and key stakeholders across Confluent Cloud to drive cross-team efforts to solve complex distributed system challenges at scale – strong cross-org partnership is core to the role.
• Operational Integrity: Lead the team in maintaining high code quality, comprehensive test coverage, and a robust on-call rotation, ensuring the control plane meets enterprise-grade reliability standards.

What You Will Bring:

• Experience: 10+ years in software development with at least 5+ years in engineering management, specifically leading teams focused on cloud-native infrastructure or managed services.
• Technical Depth: Deep knowledge of distributed systems orchestration (Kubernetes operators, controller patterns, declarative API servers) and multi-tenant resource isolation. Experience scaling control planes for managed cloud services (AWS, GCP, Azure, Elastic, Snowflake, Databricks, etc.) is highly preferred. Direct Flink experience is not required.
• Leadership Track Record: A proven track record of hiring while ensuring a high bar, keeping engineers motivated through complex technical transitions, and managing performance effectively.
• Focus on Reliability: A mindset geared toward "Operational Excellence." You understand how to build and maintain resilient, enduring technical foundations that serve as a central component for other teams to build upon.
• Communication: Exceptional ability to influence peers and upper management using data-driven, collaborative techniques and clear written/verbal communication.