Staff Software Engineer, Confluent

• BS, MS, or PhD in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience
• 8+ years of progressive experience in designing, building, and operating large-scale, mission-critical distributed systems (or equivalent expertise)
• Deep, expert-level understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including consensus protocols (e.g., Raft/Paxos), consistency models (e.g., strong, eventual), fault-tolerance, and high-availability architecture
• Experience building and operating large-scale systems in the Cloud
• Solid understanding of basic systems operations (disk, network, operating systems, etc.)
• Demonstrated history of mentoring engineers and driving significant improvement in engineering practices and operational rigor across multiple teams
• Proficiency in Java, Scala, C/C++, Go or other statically typed languages

Desirable

• Our team is responsible for managing the metadata that makes Kafka a reliable, fault-tolerant, and high-performance distributed streaming platform
• This includes coordinating the election of leaders, monitoring broker availability, persisting and distributing metadata, coordinating cluster-wide actions, and more
• In this role, you will be working on building a highly available, reliable, secure, scalable, and multi-tenant metadata layer
• You will be instrumental in driving the technical solutions end-to-end, working closely with the team and key stakeholders to design, architect, and develop top-notch solutions
• The team recently completed a major initiative to implement its own consensus protocol based on the Raft protocol
• This new protocol, named Kraft, has allowed the team to remove the dependency on Zookeeper which allows for more scalable and robust metadata management as well as a more simple deployment model for Kafka
• Here are examples of some of the challenges we've taken on in recent years:
• As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be a technical leader whose work significantly impacts the product, engineering organization, and customer success
• Drive the end-to-end delivery of complex, multi-quarter technical projects and critical infrastructure components from concept to production, setting a high bar for operational excellence, scalability, reliability, and security
• Act as a primary technical escalation point for complex, elusive production issues and architectural challenges. Proactively identify systemic weaknesses and drive large-scale refactoring or architectural changes to prevent future recurrence
• Exert influence across multiple teams and organizational boundaries (e.g., product, support, engineering) to align technical direction, mitigate cross-cutting risks, and ensure cohesive, high-quality solution delivery
• Serve as a technical voice of the customer, anticipating future needs and translating ambiguous, high-level business problems into clear, executable technical strategies and architectures that drive significant customer value and product adoption
• Act as a force multiplier by actively mentoring and coaching engineers and elevating the overall technical acumen and best practices across the organization