Principal Engineer, Confluent
Query Processing
$232.5-279k
+ Equity + Bonus
Data streaming platform
Be an early applicant
Data streaming platform
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$232.5-279k
+ Equity + Bonus
1001+ employees
Company mission
Founded by the team that built Apache Kafka, their mission is to make managing Kafka easy.
Role
Who you are
- Technical Expertise: 10+ years of hands-on software engineering experience in distributed databases. Proven track record of leading engineers across teams designing, developing, and operating large-scale and performant OLAP-style systems
- Strategic Thinker: Ability to formulate and execute strategic initiatives with a deep understanding of the industry's technical trends and the pros and cons of query engine systems
- Collaborative Mindset: Experience working cross-functionally in a dynamic, fast-paced environment, driving alignment and achieving shared goals
- Communication Skills: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, articulating technical concepts and strategies to technical and non-technical stakeholders
Desirable
- Database and Query Execution Expertise: In-depth knowledge of database internals, including query compilation and optimization, execution, vectorized runtimes, distributed shuffles, columnar storage, etc
- Query Performance and Cost Optimization: Proven experience optimizing query performance (latency, concurrency, and throughput) and cost efficiency in OLAP engines
- Large-Scale Cloud Operations: Extensive experience operating and scaling OLAP engines or data warehouses in cloud environments, using cloud-native technologies to ensure reliability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness
- Open-Source Contributions: Active participation in leading open-source projects such as Apache Flink, Calcite, DataFusion, Celeborn, Arrow, Spark, Clickhouse, Velox, and Ray, etc., showcasing technical leadership and advancing the state-of-the-art in distributed query processing
What the job involves
- We are looking for a visionary Principal Engineer to lead the architectural strategy and technical execution of Confluent's query processing initiatives. As a key leader within the Analytics organization, you will drive the development and innovation of low latency and high throughput query capabilities, empowering our customers to derive actionable insights and make data-driven decisions at scale
- Leadership and Strategy: Provide technical visionary leadership and strategic direction for query processing, aligning with Confluent’s overall business objectives
- Technical Execution: Champion engineering best practices, architectural design, and technical decision-making within the Analytics organization. Lead the design and development of a performant and highly scalable query engine leveraging Confluent’s streaming platform to deliver low-latency actionable insights
- Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Product Management, Design, and other engineering teams to define and execute product roadmaps
- Operational Excellence: Establish and monitor key metrics and performance indicators to ensure operational efficiency and delivery excellence
- Customer Focus: Collaborate with Product and Customer Success teams to understand customer needs and feedback, incorporating insights into technical long-term roadmaps
Our take
Confluent is a commercial company built on top of the open-source Apache Kafka project. Confluent and Kafka have developed a streaming data technology that processes massive amounts of information in real-time.
The streaming database technology was developed at LinkedIn as a way of moving massive amounts of messages. The company decided to open-source that tech in 2011, and Confluent launched as the commercial arm in 2014.
While the base open-source component remains available for free download, it doesn’t include the additional tooling the company has built to make it easier for enterprises to use Kafka. Confluent's value add is in those additional tools, including a cloud version of the product and a marketplace for sharing extensions to the platform.
Confluent expanded strategic partnerships with Microsoft and acquired Immerok, and in 2023 expanded its cloud platform. 2024 saw further product expansions with the launch of the Confluent Migration Accelerator, all exemplifying how the company is living up to its name by rocket-boosting the benefits of Apache Kafka integration for companies.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Few candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
27% female employees
14% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Apr 2020
$250m
SERIES E
Jan 2019
$125m
SERIES D
Total funding: $455.9m
Company values
- Earn Our Customers' Love - Our customers are the lifeblood of our business and our most important stakeholder. We strive to earn their love with everything we do
- To Build a Great Company, Build a Great Team - We believe that an important part of building a great company is making sure that our employees are the best they can be.
- Smart, Humble, and Empathetic - Our employees appreciate, benefit, and learn from working with other smart, humble, and empathetic people. We strive to hire those who care deeply about others and interact with empathy towards our customers, partners, and employees.
- Be Fired up and Get It Done - As much as we benefit from working with smart, humble, and empathetic employees, we also need to “get it done” to pursue our enormous market opportunity. We are in hyper-growth mode and are scaling to fill the demands of the market and our current and future customers.
- Tasteful not Wasteful - We want to invest in areas that matter the most -- in other words, spend “tastefully,” not wastefully. We believe that thoughtful spending is essential to building a high-quality business.
- One Team - It is critical that we act as and make decisions as a unified company, doing our best to optimize globally rather than locally. This means doing our best to avoid the misalignments that some companies can be prone to. It means recognizing that when employees and teams succeed, Confluent as a whole succeeds.
Company HQ
Mountain View, California
Articles
Leadership
Jay Kreps
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously a Principal Engineer at LinkedIn.
Neha Narkhede
(Co-Founder & Board Member)Previously a Lead Engineer at LinkedIn and Oracle. They are an Investor/advisor for Gem, Block Party, Material Security, Abacus AI, Cortex Data, Yugabyte, Metaphor Data, Natalist, Common Room, and more.
Jun Rao
(Co-Founder)Previously a Senior Engineer at LinkedIn. Has a PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University.
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