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Confluent's Data Streaming Platform is only as trustworthy as the schemas, metadata, and policies that govern it. As more of the platform's value shifts toward real-time processing and AI-driven decisioning, the systems that keep data well-formed, reliable, discoverable, and compliant, from the moment it's produced through every downstream consumer, become as critical to correctness as the storage and compute layers themselves. The governance layer and the stream catalog integrates the Data Streaming Platform into a unified, intuitive and intelligent product to serve the critical real-time use cases for our customers.
Confluent Schema Registry - a foundational building block for streaming governance is a widely adopted infrastructure in the industry supporting over 4 Million schemas across 60K customer facing clusters with throughputs as high as 5K reqs/sec for some use cases. Solving complex distributed systems challenges at this scale is one of the core dimensions of this role.
As a Principal Engineer, you will be a key technical leader shaping the long-term architecture, scalability, and reliability of Confluent's schema and metadata governance systems, and their integration across the broader Confluent Streaming Platform. You will focus on advancing the core layers of Stream Governance, including highly available, multi-tenant infrastructure and the systems responsible for schema management, data policy enforcement, and metadata consistency at scale.
You will own company-level technical domains, set direction for critical initiatives, and influence both engineering practices and product strategy. This role requires operating with autonomy in highly ambiguous spaces, making decisions that balance technical depth with business impact to ensure reliability and scalability for governance services across all of Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform.
Confluent's Data Streaming Platform is only as trustworthy as the schemas, metadata, and policies that govern it. As more of the platform's value shifts toward real-time processing and AI-driven decisioning, the systems that keep data well-formed, reliable, discoverable, and compliant, from the moment it's produced through every downstream consumer, become as critical to correctness as the storage and compute layers themselves. The governance layer and the stream catalog integrates the Data Streaming Platform into a unified, intuitive and intelligent product to serve the critical real-time use cases for our customers.
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Confluent Schema Registry - a foundational building block for streaming governance is a widely adopted infrastructure in the industry supporting over 4 Million schemas across 60K customer facing clusters with throughputs as high as 5K reqs/sec for some use cases. Solving complex distributed systems challenges at this scale is one of the core dimensions of this role.
As a Principal Engineer, you will be a key technical leader shaping the long-term architecture, scalability, and reliability of Confluent's schema and metadata governance systems, and their integration across the broader Confluent Streaming Platform. You will focus on advancing the core layers of Stream Governance, including highly available, multi-tenant infrastructure and the systems responsible for schema management, data policy enforcement, and metadata consistency at scale.
You will own company-level technical domains, set direction for critical initiatives, and influence both engineering practices and product strategy. This role requires operating with autonomy in highly ambiguous spaces, making decisions that balance technical depth with business impact to ensure reliability and scalability for governance services across all of Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform.
Deep Expertise: A proven track record of leading the architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems with company-level impact.
Distributed Systems Mastery: Comprehensive knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, scalability, and cloud-native platforms.
Streaming Architecture Fluency: Working depth with streaming or event-driven architectures, and familiarity with adjacent domains such as schema management, data catalogs, or metadata/governance systems.
Strategic Influence: Ability to navigate ambiguity, reduce systemic complexity, and anticipate industry trends to design systems for the next 3–5 years.
Leadership Presence: Strong ability to influence executives and stakeholders while fostering a collaborative environment across multiple teams.
Execution: Demonstrated ability to move from high-level vision to detailed technical implementation and delivery, with a strong bias toward shipped, adopted outcomes over theoretical design.
Industry Leadership: Recognized industry thought leader through open-source contributions or driving initiatives from ground up.
Advanced Domain Knowledge: Experience with data catalog, metadata, or governance ecosystems, or large-scale data infrastructure supporting mission-critical workloads.
Cloud Infrastructure: Deep experience with public clouds (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and expertise in resource management and multi-tenancy in complex cloud environments.
AI-Adjacent Systems: Experience building infrastructure that serves AI or agentic workloads, particularly around metadata, context quality, or governance.
Belonging isn’t a perk here. It’s the baseline. We work across time zones and backgrounds, knowing the best ideas come from different perspectives. And we make space for everyone to lead, grow, and challenge what’s possible.
We’re proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. Employment decisions are based on job-related criteria, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other classification protected by law.
Confluent is an IBM subsidiary which has been acquired by IBM and will be integrated into the IBM organization. By proceeding with this application, you understand that Confluent will share your personal information with other IBM affiliates involved in your recruitment process, wherever these are located. More Information on how IBM protects your personal information, including the safeguards in case of cross-border data transfer, are available here.
Confluent provides a data streaming platform built on Apache Kafka, enabling enterprises to stream, connect, process, and govern real-time data across their organization.
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Senior · 3–5 years experience
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