Staff Product Manager, Real-Time Data Analytics Platform

Details

Confluent is building a data streaming platform that moves information in near real time, helping companies react faster, build smarter, and deliver dynamic experiences.

About the Role

Enterprises currently stitch together separate systems for streaming, analytics, and serving, each with its own latency, cost, and operational overhead. Confluent is developing a platform that continuously materializes streaming data into fast, queryable state for real-time analytics, operational applications, and downstream intelligent systems.

As Staff Product Manager, you will own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the core streaming analytics engine underlying Confluent's real-time data platform. The system sits at the intersection of stream processing, real-time analytical databases, and modern serving infrastructure. It transforms data in motion into low-latency, queryable materialized views that power AI agents, dashboards, operational queries, and event-driven applications.

You will own the engine's storage, materialization, query layer, performance, and developer experience, while partnering with product managers responsible for downstream product experiences. This foundational role involves defining a product category combining streaming analytics, real-time OLAP, materialized views, and modern database systems in a cloud-native, streaming-first architecture.

Responsibilities

• Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine, including storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience.
• Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases and articulate Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative.
• Drive architectural and product tradeoffs involving consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics.
• Partner closely with engineering on the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale.
• Collaborate with product managers responsible for downstream experiences, including AI, context delivery, and application integration.
• Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI.
• Shape the developer experience and refine go-to-market positioning.
• Collaborate with product and platform teams to ensure integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud.
• Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area.
• Influence company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles.
• 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch.
• Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture through product management or hands-on engineering experience.
• Experience defining and launching products in data infrastructure, analytics databases, or stream processing.
• Strong technical judgment and comfort navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization.
• A track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership.

Preferred Qualifications

• Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems.
• Experience with real-time OLAP engines such as ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, or Apache Pinot.
• Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure.
• Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery.
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models.
• Experience working on open-source data infrastructure projects.

Company Information

Confluent states that it is an equal opportunity workplace and makes employment decisions based on job-related criteria without regard to legally protected characteristics. Confluent is an IBM subsidiary that has been acquired by IBM and will be integrated into the IBM organization. As part of the application process, Confluent may share applicant personal information with IBM affiliates involved in recruitment.