Principal Engineer I, Governance

Details

Confluent is building a Data Streaming Platform that enables organizations to process information in near real time. The governance layer and stream catalog integrate schemas, metadata, and policies into a unified product for real-time use cases.

As a Principal Engineer, you will shape 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 highly available, multi-tenant infrastructure; schema management; data policy enforcement; and metadata consistency at scale. You will own company-level technical domains, set direction for critical initiatives, and influence engineering practices and product strategy across Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive company-level technical strategy for governance systems, including schema and metadata infrastructure.
• Architect and evolve high-performance metadata management systems supporting low-latency lookups, strong consistency guarantees, and coherent behavior across streaming and processing engines.
• Design and evolve data protection capabilities, including encryption, access control, and schema validation, enforced consistently across the platform.
• Build and maintain highly available, multi-tenant infrastructure optimized for scalability, reliability, and resilience.
• Establish and promote engineering standards, architectural patterns, and technical frameworks across the organization.
• Partner with executives, product management, and engineering leaders to align technical vision with business objectives and build consensus on shared architecture decisions.
• Mentor senior- and staff-level engineers and help develop future technical leaders.
• Contribute to relevant open-source projects and represent Confluent through technical talks and thought leadership.

Requirements

• Proven experience leading the architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems with company-level impact.
• Comprehensive knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, scalability, and cloud-native platforms.
• Working depth with streaming or event-driven architectures.
• Familiarity with schema management, data catalogs, or metadata and governance systems.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, reduce systemic complexity, and design systems for the next three to five years.
• Strong ability to influence executives and stakeholders while fostering collaboration across multiple teams.
• Demonstrated ability to move from high-level vision to detailed technical implementation and delivery, with a focus on shipped and adopted outcomes.

Preferred Qualifications

• Recognized industry leadership through open-source contributions or driving initiatives from the ground up.
• Experience with data catalog, metadata, or governance ecosystems, or large-scale data infrastructure supporting mission-critical workloads.
• Deep experience with public clouds, including AWS, Azure, or GCP, and expertise in resource management and multi-tenancy in complex cloud environments.
• Experience building infrastructure for AI or agentic workloads, particularly around metadata, context quality, or governance.

Benefits

• Equity.
• Bonus.
• Competitive pay and employee benefits.
• Equal opportunity workplace with a focus on belonging and inclusive collaboration.