Staff Software Engineer, Confluent

• Experienced builder: Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production
• Distributed systems & cloud expert: Deep hands‑on experience with at least some of:
• Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, scalability)
• Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud‑native architectures
• Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms
• Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java or Scala, and comfort working across services, infrastructure, and automation
• Architect & executor: Able to define end‑to‑end designs, break them into milestones, de‑risk early, and land them on time with high quality
• Operationally rigorous: You think in terms of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response; you design for safe change and graceful degradation
• Great communicator: You write clear design docs, explain trade‑offs crisply, and can lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders (engineers, PMs, leadership)
• Leader without authority: You’ve successfully led cross‑team projects, influenced technical direction beyond your immediate code, and helped others level up
• Values‑aligned: You care about customer impact, reliability, long‑term maintainability, and helping the team win, not just shipping features

Desirable

• We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud
• In this role you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform
• You’ll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and cross‑team leadership, identifying high‑leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact
• Own end‑to‑end architecture and delivery of complex control‑plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, data models) that support Confluent Cloud products
• Lead open‑ended technical initiatives: take ambiguous problems, clarify requirements, define the approach, and drive execution across teams and services
• Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout/rollback patterns
• Collaborate across orgs (Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE and others) to align on designs, trade‑offs, and long‑term platform direction
• Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels; provide high‑quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team
• Continuously improve developer experience for our control‑plane stack (tooling, automation, CI/CD, test strategy) to remove toil and increase velocity
• Influence technical strategy in your domain: identify high‑impact opportunities, propose roadmaps, and help prioritize work aligned with business goals
• Contribute to engineering culture via documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing (internal talks, wikis, or external content where appropriate)