Head of Kafka Engineering, Confluent
$273-327.6k
Plus annual bonus, and a competitive equity package
Data streaming platform
Open for applications
Data streaming platform
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$273-327.6k
Plus annual bonus, and a competitive equity package
1001+ employees
Company mission
Founded by the team that built Apache Kafka, their mission is to make managing Kafka easy.
Role
Who you are
- 5-10+ years of engineering management experience leading productive, high-functioning teams
- Ability to hire while ensuring a high hiring bar, keep engineers motivated, coach/mentor, and handle performance management
- Experience with running large stateful data systems in the cloud
- Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development
- A strong track record of shipping features and hitting deadlines consistently. Should be able to move fast, build in increments, and iterate. Have a sense of urgency, an aggressive mindset towards achieving results, and excellent prioritization skills
- Able to anticipate future technical needs for the product and craft plans to realize them, guided by our customers
- Preferred experience running production services in public clouds
- Ability to influence the team, peers, and upper management using effective communication and collaborative techniques. Focus on building and maintaining a culture of collaboration within the team
- An advanced degree in Computer Science or similar field or equivalent industry experience
What the job involves
- We are looking for a senior leader to lead this organization
- In this role, we are excited for you to drive the vision, recruit and build out the engineering team and create a high-performing engineering team that solves complex stream processing challenges at scale
- Lead a highly productive, global team of software engineers and engineering leaders
- Drive long-term direction and strategy, while maintaining high levels of productivity and execution standards within your organization
- Create competitive advantages for Confluent by driving technical innovation
- Continue a strong growth trajectory by hiring top-tier engineers, and establish quality standards, design principles, and operational maturity for your team
- Work closely with peer engineering leaders to prioritize improvements in all these areas - from a culture of continuous improvement to prioritizing large and high-impact initiatives that will fundamentally change Kafka
- Drive the definition, design and delivery of cutting-edge data infrastructure features for Kafka
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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