Principal Engineer I - Cloud Observability

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 charter of the Confluent Observability team has been continuously expanding since its inception. You will technically drive the advancements in an expanding Confluent Observability charter. We want to ensure the quality of our Confluent Cloud observability features raise the bar. You will design and build technology for this. How do we enable our cloud and hybrid customers to gain insight into the health and performance of their Confluent resources quickly and effectively, ensuring that the experience of operating Confluent is unmatched? How do we bring forth new observability capabilities with rock-solid reliability while growing to 10x scale and beyond? How do we enable near real-time use cases for our customers’ most challenging use cases? This means being able to handle open-ended strategy in this area. Confluent needs you to explore and experiment with new ideas that benefit customers and not merely be driven by a list of requirements to deliver. You will be one of the leading technologists across the Confluent Observability organization. You will architect and design solutions and review design implementations and code. You will have the opportunity to work across the breadth and depth of technology in Confluent. Being in such engineering teams requires you to handle not only the operational and engineering excellence but also aid in development of the roadmap, evolving vision and direction for the team. Collaboration with the rest of the organization will be essential to make progress on the roadmap, support Confluent’s product initiatives, and make the vision a reality. What You Will Do: You will work with a team of engineers and architects to help evolve Confluent Observability features. Work closely with product management, engineering leadership, and other key stakeholders across various teams in Confluent to build and drive the overall roadmap. Need you to be a strong tech voice outside Confluent Observability within Confluent. Influence the overall domain health and operational hygiene for Confluent Observability. We need a tech champion for the observability capabilities we provide to our customers. You are expected to review designs and code and improve our technical standards. We are looking at you to lead the technology charter for our observability features in Confluent Cloud and in hybrid scenarios with Confluent Platform. Mentor a team of high-performing engineers and leads, helping them to continue in growing their skill set through hands-on experience and mentorship. Be a strong technical leader and representative for engineering teams in India. Provide timely and productive feedback, encourage a growth mindset, and advise team members in setting and working toward personal development goals. Nurture a culture of excellence on the team through a focus on hiring, communication, execution, and work quality. Create and manage processes that enable the team to do its best work. What You Will Bring: Minimum of 15+ years of hands-on software development experience with the ability to anticipate future technical needs for the product and craft plans to realize them. Taking ideas to production is something we look for. Ready to roll up your sleeves - code, debug, design - do whatever it takes to ship the product to production. Experience building and operating large-scale systems. Solid understanding of basic systems operations (disk, network, operating systems, etc). Experience running production services in the cloud. Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development. Solid fundamentals in concurrent and multi-threading programming. A self starter with the ability to work effectively in teams. Proactively identifying the symptoms of technical issues and reason about their causes is needed. This will be followed by fixing the root causes. Timely shipping of deliverables; being able to trade-off short term technical decisions with the long term. Move fast, build in increments, and iterate. A sense of urgency, a mindset towards achieving results, and excellent prioritization skills. Ability to influence the team, peers and upper management in technology decisions using effective communication and collaborative techniques Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent experience. Understanding of various technologies, programming paradigms and frameworks is needed. Ability to be pragmatic and trade off their usage in production is essential. Ability to take on intense customer production issues on-call; debugging and mitigating them will be needed. This requires patient log and metrics analysis with solid reasoning to nail the issue. What Gives You an Edge: Experience in designing and developing effective solutions for systems observability problems, including effective enablement of metrics, logging, events, or traces capabilities. Experience using and operating Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Apache Druid, and OpenSearch is a big plus. Interest in evangelism (giving talks at tech conferences, writing blog posts evangelizing Kafka). Experience working on stream processing technology or query processing systems. Ready to build what's next? Let’s get in motion. Come As You Are Belonging isn’t a perk here. It’s the baseline. We work across time zones and backgrounds, knowing the best ideas come from different perspectives. And we make space for everyone to lead, grow, and challenge what’s possible. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. Employment decisions are based on job-related criteria, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other classification protected by law. Privacy Statement Confluent is an IBM subsidiary which has been acquired by IBM and will be integrated into the IBM organization. By proceeding with this application, you understand that Confluent will share your personal information with other IBM affiliates involved in your recruitment process, wherever these are located. 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