Tech Stack
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value.
About proficiency levels:
- 1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;
- 3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;
- 7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;
- 10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.
API @ 7
AWS @ 4
Azure @ 4
Communication @ 6
Databricks @ 4
Engineering Management @ 6
Flink @ 6
GCP @ 4
Hiring @ 4
Kubernetes @ 7
Leadership @ 6
Mentoring
People Management
Security
Snowflake @ 4
Software Development @ 8
- 1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;
- 3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;
- 7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;
- 10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.
Details
Confluent is building a data streaming platform that enables companies to process information in near real time. The Flink Platform team is building a robust, serverless control plane for Confluent's fully managed Flink offering.
As Senior Engineering Manager, you will lead a team of approximately 10 engineers, including two Staff-level individual contributors, responsible for the control plane behind the streaming service. The team owns the customer-facing Flink REST API and Gateway, Kubernetes operators that orchestrate Flink job lifecycles, and the declarative API server supporting them. Key responsibilities include multi-tenant isolation, end-to-end reliability, and integration between Confluent's global control plane and regional Flink data plane.
This role combines technical strategy, architectural leadership, reliability, and people management, with a focus on developing senior engineers into future Staff-level leaders.
Responsibilities
- Own the roadmap and execution for the Flink Control Plane.
- Define the strategy for job orchestration, including submission, scaling, recovery, and serverless resource management.
- Lead migration of the control plane onto Confluent's latest platform foundations.
- Drive component refactoring to improve reliability, security, and scale.
- Partner with engineering teams and product management on product definition, architectural design, and delivery.
- Evolve the control plane to support 10x growth in compute pools, statements, and tenants per region.
- Eliminate hotspots in metadata and orchestration layers to maintain fast, predictable customer-facing operations under load.
- Manage and coach a diverse team, mentoring junior and mid-level developers and helping them develop the architectural context and leadership skills needed to reach Staff-level roles.
- Collaborate with engineering leadership and stakeholders across Confluent Cloud on complex distributed-systems challenges.
- Maintain high code quality, comprehensive test coverage, a robust on-call rotation, and enterprise-grade reliability standards.
Requirements
- 10+ years of software development experience.
- 5+ years of engineering management experience leading teams focused on cloud-native infrastructure or managed services.
- Deep knowledge of distributed-systems orchestration, including Kubernetes operators, controller patterns, declarative API servers, and multi-tenant resource isolation.
- Experience scaling control planes for managed cloud services such as AWS, GCP, Azure, Elastic, Snowflake, or Databricks is highly preferred.
- Direct Flink experience is not required.
- Proven experience hiring while maintaining a high bar, motivating engineers through complex technical transitions, and managing performance effectively.
- Strong focus on operational excellence and building resilient, enduring technical foundations.
- Exceptional ability to influence peers and upper management using data-driven, collaborative techniques.
- Clear written and verbal communication skills.
Company Information
Confluent is an equal opportunity workplace. Employment decisions are based on job-related criteria without regard to protected characteristics. Confluent is an IBM subsidiary that has been acquired by IBM and will be integrated into the IBM organization.