Principal Engineer, Confluent
Engineering AI Productivity
$285-342k
Offers equity
Data streaming platform
Be an early applicant
Data streaming platform
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$285-342k
Offers equity
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
- 8+ years driving strategic productivity initiatives, ideally in SaaS/Cloud platforms or developer tools with some proven experience in AI initiatives
- Considered an expert in building distributed systems and/or the infrastructure and tools to support it
- Proven ability to lead cross-functional teams and influence senior stakeholders without direct authority
- Strong communicator who can translate complex technical strategies into impact-oriented outcomes
- Demonstrated track record delivering products or features that generated measurable business value
- Comfortable defining success criteria, metrics, and ROI for ambiguous, future-facing domains
- Hands-on experience with AI or adjacent AI/ML platform experience with LLM integration and workflow automation, with demonstrated appetite to build toward agentic patterns
- Deep understanding of responsible AI practices and governance
- Passion for solving real customer problems with elegant, scalable solutions
- Ability to tie technical efforts directly to business KPIs (adoption, retention, revenue impact)
Desirable
- Experience working in cloud-native platforms or developer ecosystems
- Prior leadership in scaling internal AI platforms or driving AI adoption across large organizations
- Background in real-time data, event-driven architecture, or platform engineering
What the job involves
- We’re seeking a strategic and hands-on technical leader to define and drive Confluent’s internal agentic AI capabilities, and adoption of smart, automated decisioning systems for R&D productivity. In this role, you will partner across Engineering, Security, and IT to scale AI usage across our platform to accelerate value for customers and the business
- You will operationalize a vision where AI augments developers, automates routine tasks, and orchestrates intelligent workflows that unlock new usage patterns
- Define and evangelize the AI and agentic flows strategy — aligning business metrics, engineering needs, and platform opportunities
- Build a roadmap for introducing agentic automation features, smart assistants, and AI-driven workflows across all aspects of engineering
- Identify and resolve bottlenecks across the entire product and software development life cycle
- Partner with Engineering, Trust and Security to integrate AI capabilities responsibly and at scale
- Operationalize AI adoption internally and share use cases externally
- Drive complex cross-team projects requiring multi-stakeholder alignment
- Continuously raise the bar for code/architectural quality across engineering
- Lead the delivery of core agentic workflows that improves productivity across engineering
- Balance of hands-on contributions with effective delegation to others. Expect 60% execution and 40% strategy setting
- Drive measurable adoption of AI tooling and flows with internal teams
- Ability to adopt industry standards, ethical frameworks, guardrails, and quality metrics for AI behavior and automated flows
- Define success metrics and KPIs (e.g., AI-driven usage lift, automation ROI, reduction in manual workflows)
- Participate in external forums — conferences, podcasts, customer briefings on occasion
- Evolve as the technology landscape shifts
- Write internal playbooks for building and scaling agentic outcomes
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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