Senior Engineering Manager, Flink Control Plane

Details

We’re not just building better tech. We’re rewriting how data moves and what the world can do with it. With Confluent, data doesn’t sit still. Our platform puts information in motion, streaming in near real-time so companies can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them.

It takes a certain kind of person to join this team. Those who ask hard questions, give honest feedback, and show up for each other. No egos, no solo acts. Just smart, curious humans pushing toward something bigger, together.

One Confluent. One Team. One Data Streaming Platform.

About the Role

The Flink Platform team is building a robust, serverless control plane for Confluent’s fully managed Flink offering. As the Senior Engineering Manager you will lead a high-impact team (~10 engineers, including two Staff-level individual contributors) responsible for the "brain" of the streaming service. Your team owns the customer-facing Flink REST API and Gateway, the Kubernetes operators that orchestrate Flink job lifecycles (submission, scaling, recovery), and the declarative API server that backs them. The team is responsible for multi-tenant isolation, end-to-end reliability, and integration between Confluent's global control plane and regional Flink data planes.

This role balances deep technical strategy (architectural excellence and reliability) with people leadership, growing senior engineers into future Staff-level leaders.

Responsibilities

• Own the overall roadmap and execution for the Flink Control Plane; define strategy for job orchestration (submission, scaling, recovery) and serverless resource management.
• Lead migration of the control plane onto Confluent's platform foundations and drive major component refactors to improve reliability, security, and scale.
• Collaborate with engineering teams and product management on product definition, architectural design, and delivery; influence domain health and operational hygiene.
• Drive evolution of the control plane to support 10x growth in compute pools, statements, and tenants per region; eliminate hotspots in metadata and orchestration layers.
• Manage and coach a diverse engineering team; mentor junior and mid-level developers to advance toward Staff levels.
• Work cross-organizationally with engineering leadership and stakeholders across Confluent Cloud to solve distributed systems challenges at scale.
• Maintain high code quality, comprehensive test coverage, and a robust on-call rotation to meet enterprise-grade reliability standards.

Requirements

• 10+ years in software development with at least 5+ years in engineering management, specifically leading teams focused on cloud-native infrastructure or managed services.
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems orchestration, including Kubernetes operators, controller patterns, and declarative API servers. Experience with multi-tenant resource isolation.
• Experience scaling control planes for managed cloud services (examples listed: AWS, GCP, Azure, Elastic, Snowflake, Databricks) is highly preferred. Direct Flink experience is not required.
• Proven track record of hiring to a high bar, keeping engineers motivated through complex technical transitions, and managing performance effectively.
• Strong focus on operational excellence and building resilient technical foundations.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; ability to influence peers and senior leadership using data-driven, collaborative techniques.

Culture & Privacy

Belonging is a baseline: Confluent is an equal opportunity workplace and makes space for diverse perspectives. Confluent (an IBM subsidiary) may share applicant personal information with IBM affiliates involved in recruitment; more information is provided in the privacy statement linked in the original posting.