Director of Engineering, Confluent
Office located in Palo Alto, CA
Data streaming platform
Open for applications
Data streaming platform
1001+ employees
Open for applications
Office located in Palo Alto, CA
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help every organization harness data in motion so they can compete and thrive in the modern world.
Role
Who you are
- We’re looking for self-motivated team members who crave a challenge and feel energized to roll up their sleeves and help realize Confluent’s enormous potential
- If you love the hum of big data systems, thinking about how to make them run as smoothly as possible, and want to have a big influence on the architecture plus operational design points of this new product, then you will fit right in
- A smart, humble, and empathetic attitude
- A strong sense of teamwork and are excited about team and company success
- Drive and excitement about challenges of a fast-paced, innovative software startup environment
- 10+ years of experience in delivering scalable software solutions
- Proven track record of leading the delivery of large-scale, highly available, low latency, high quality systems
- Deep hands-on technical expertise in hyper-scale distributed systems engineering
- Deep expertise in multi-cluster / multi-tenant Kubernetes a big plus
- Deep expertise in safe deployment of mission-critical workloads at high-scale a big plus
- Expertise in Language Runtimes (JVM, WASM, CPython, etc.) a big plus
- Expertise in Container & Virtualization/Hypervisor technologies (firecracker/gVisor/ cloud-hypervisor/kata-containers, etc.)
- Experience in large-scale safe deployment technologies & best practices
- Experience in Cloud Native technologies including networking & security
- Experience in driving operational excellence for large, production services
- Track record of providing technical leadership and mentorship
- Track record of working collaboratively across teams and roles, including but not limited to product management, UX, and other engineering teams and leaders
What the job involves
- Chart your own path and take healthy risks as we solve big problems together. We value having diverse teams and want you to grow as we grow—whether you’re just starting out in your career or managing a large team, you’ll be amazed at the magnitude of your impact
- As Director II of the Compute Platform & Unified Deployment org, you will be working closely with the team and other key stakeholders to design, architect and build out our secure, multi-tenant, polyglot, Cloud-native Compute substrate to enable new business opportunities across Confluent Cloud (including Kafka, Flink, Connect, Tableflow, Confluent Intelligence, and more)
- As one of the senior technical leaders in R&D, you think strategically and you help drive end-to-end technical delivery from customer experience to scaling internal operations
- You are not confined to the status quo and you leverage your expertise in Cloud-native, large-scale distributed systems to help take our platform to the next level
- You worry about key operational aspects (availability, reliability, performance, monitoring, emergency response, capacity planning, disaster recovery) of our Platform & the Products built on top of it, and you make sure that we have a highly-available, resilient and secure offering that our largest Fortune 500 customers can rely on for their mission-critical workloads
- Be part of driving the overall technical charter for the Compute Platform & Unified Deployment org -- including, but not limited to cloud infrastructure, big data, security & AI
- Work closely with product management and engineering management to build and drive the overall roadmap for Confluent’s Compute Platform to enable new business opportunities
- Deliver high impact to the business by driving important technical initiatives in areas comprising (but not limited to) security, reliability, multi-tenancy, architectural direction, and major component refactor across organizational boundaries
- Be as a strong technical leader and representative for engineering across the Compute organization
- Lead the team and the product on aspects of product definition, architectural design, and delivery
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.
Now, it looks like IBM is eyeing the company for acquisition and Confluent looks to be a natural fit. Long positioned as the real-time backbone behind modern application, Confluent would gain global scale and an even deeper enterprise reach under iBM, while cementing its role at the center of AI-driven architectures. For COnfluent, the deal would marka shift from fast-growing independent disruptor to foundational infrastructure player powering the next wave of enterprise AI.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Apr 2020
$250m
SERIES E
Jan 2019
$125m
SERIES D
Total funding: $455.9m
Company HQ
Old Mountain View, Mountain View, CA
Leadership
Jay Kreps
(Co-Founder & CEO)Prior to co-founding Confluent in 2014, Jay spent 7 years at LinkedIn, holding various roles including Principal Engineer and Principal Staff Engineer.
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