Principal Engineer, Engineering AI Productivity

Details

We’re building systems that put data in motion and reimagining how AI augments engineering productivity. This role is a strategic, hands-on technical leadership position to define and scale Confluent’s internal agentic AI capabilities, agentic automation features, smart assistants, and AI-driven workflows to accelerate R&D productivity. You will partner across Engineering, Trust & Security, and IT to operationalize AI adoption and drive measurable value.

Responsibilities

• Strategy & Vision

  • 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 engineering.
  • Identify and resolve bottlenecks across the product and software development life cycle.

• Cross-Functional Leadership

  • 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 and architectural quality across engineering.

• Execution & Delivery

  • Lead delivery of core agentic workflows that improve engineering productivity.
  • Balance hands-on contributions with delegation (expect ~60% execution, 40% strategy).
  • Drive measurable adoption of AI tooling and flows with internal teams.

• Governance & Best Practices

  • 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).

• Thought Leadership

  • Participate in external forums (conferences, podcasts, customer briefings) on occasion.
  • Write internal playbooks for building and scaling agentic outcomes.

Requirements

• Technical and Product Acumen

  • 8+ years driving strategic productivity initiatives, ideally in SaaS/cloud platforms or developer tools, with proven experience in AI initiatives.
  • Expert experience building distributed systems and/or the infrastructure and tools to support them.

• Leadership & Collaboration

  • Proven ability to lead cross-functional teams and influence senior stakeholders without direct authority.
  • Strong communicator able to translate complex technical strategies into impact-oriented outcomes.

• Execution Focus

  • Demonstrated track record delivering products or features that generated measurable business value.
  • Comfortable defining success criteria, metrics, and ROI for ambiguous, future-facing domains.

• AI/ML & Automation

  • Hands-on experience with AI or adjacent AI/ML platform work, including LLM integration and workflow automation, with appetite to build toward agentic patterns.
  • Deep understanding of responsible AI practices and governance.

• Customer & Business Mindset

  • Passion for solving real customer problems with elegant, scalable solutions and ability to tie technical efforts to business KPIs (adoption, retention, revenue impact).

What Gives You an Edge

• 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.

Come As You Are

Belonging is the baseline at Confluent. The company emphasizes diverse perspectives, equal opportunity employment, and inclusion across time zones and backgrounds.

Privacy Statement

Confluent (an IBM subsidiary being integrated into IBM) will share personal information with IBM affiliates involved in recruitment. More information on data protection and cross-border safeguards is available via IBM’s careers privacy policy.