Principal Engineer I – Governance

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Define and lead the technical strategy at a company-wide level for governance systems.

• Design and enhance high-performance metadata management systems ensuring low-latency access and strong consistency.

• Develop and improve data protection features, including encryption, access control, and schema validation.

• Construct and sustain a highly available, multi-tenant governance infrastructure tailored for scalability, reliability, and resilience.

• Establish and promote engineering standards, architectural frameworks, and technical guidelines.

• Collaborate with executives, product management, and engineering leaders to align the technical vision with business goals.

• Foster consensus among teams regarding shared architectural decisions.

• Mentor senior and staff-level engineers, enhancing engineering excellence and cultivating a culture of open-source contributions.

• Engage in relevant open-source projects.

• Represent Confluent in external forums through technical presentations and thought leadership.

⛳️ Requirements

• Proven experience in leading the architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems impacting the entire company.

• In-depth knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, scalability, and cloud-native environments.

• Proficient understanding of streaming or event-driven architectures.

• Familiarity with schema management, data catalogs, or metadata/governance systems.

• Capability to navigate through ambiguity, simplify systemic complexity, and foresee industry trends for the next 3–5 years.

• Ability to influence executives and stakeholders while promoting collaboration across various teams.

• Proven capacity to transition from high-level vision to detailed technical execution and delivery.

• Experience in contributing to open-source projects or initiating initiatives from the ground up.

• Background in data catalog, metadata, or governance ecosystems, or large-scale data infrastructure that supports mission-critical workloads.

• Extensive experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP, including resource management and multi-tenancy in complex cloud settings.

• Experience in constructing infrastructure for AI or agentic workloads, especially related to metadata, context quality, or governance.

🏝️ Benefits

• Equity

• Bonus

• Competitive pay and benefits

• Equal opportunity workplace

• Opportunities to contribute to open-source projects and represent Confluent externally