Staff Software Engineer I

With Confluent, organisations can harness the full power of continuously flowing data to innovate and win in the modern digital world. We have a purpose that drives us to do better everyday – we're creating an entirely new category within data infrastructure - data streaming. This technology will allow every organisation to create experiences and use the power of data in ways that profoundly impact the way we all live. This impact is our purpose and drives us to do better every day.

One Confluent. One team. One Data Streaming Platform.

Data Connects Us.

About the Role:

The charter of the CP team has been continuously expanding since its inception. You will technically drive the advancements in ever expanding CP Charter.  We want to ensure the quality of deliverables holds the bar - you will design and build tech for this. We want to ensure our release engineering is efficient - need your ideas to drive this. We want to bring the latest K8S ecosystem to our CFK - how do we leverage the progress here to benefit our customers. How do we improve our management and monitoring of huge CP clusters in multi-geography deployments; how do we up our security game to ensure our customers are ready to handle the regulatory data protection changes being brought about across the globe. This means being able to handle open-ended strategy in this area - needs you to explore and experiment new ideas that benefit customers - not driven by a list of requirements to deliver.  How do we better support our on-call engineers and resolve customer’s issue in the SLA we have promised.

You will be one of the leading technologists across the CP organization. Architecting and designing Solutions, reviewing design implementations and code. Code yourself and build complex parts of the system. Handle customer on-calls - debug issues and suggest mitigations. You will have the opportunity to work across the breadth and depth of technology in CP. Being in such engineering teams requires you to handle not only the operational and engineering excellence but also aid in development  of the roadmap; evolve vision and direction for the team. Collaborate with the rest of the organization to make progress on the roadmap and make the vision a reality. 

What You Will Do:

• You will work with a team of engineers and architects to help evolve the Confluent Platform.
• Work closely with product management, engineering leadership, and other key stakeholders across various teams in Confluent and Confluent Cloud to build and drive the overall roadmap. Need you to be a strong tech voice outside CP in Confluent.
• Influence the overall domain health and operational hygiene for the Confluent Platform. We need a tech champion for CP.  Review code, designs and improvements are expected from you.
• We are looking at you to lead the technology charter in CP; start with improving critical quality gate infrastructure and design. This design and architecture in this area impacts all the teams participating in CP.
• CP Readiness is one of key things that makes us sleep peacefully at night. This area is in the watch of Confluent’s leadership - they have a lot of views and are passionate about moving the needle here.  
• Designing and implementing tech in CP readiness - how to automatically quarantine flaky tests, how do we deflake if necessary? How do we port our integration test framework to use K8S infrastructure - so it's more efficient in terms of time and costs. How do we automate new OS certification? These are open ended challenges which require architecture and implementation muscle.
• CP Monitoring and Management re-haul and design is another area to focus on for you. We need to make our monitoring product performant and scale it to handle a large fleet of clusters. Need to validate the rationale behind technical choices we have made for the same and change if necessary.
• CP on-call - how do we embedded tech to ensure debuggability and support across C3 is improved. How do we make it self-serve issue fixes for customers and L1 support.
• Mentor a team of high-performing engineers and leads, helping them to continue in growing their skill set through hands-on experience and mentorship.
• 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 13+ 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.
• 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 productions 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 open-source development  
• Experience using Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Apache Spark 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  
• Additional highly desirable experience  
• Stream processing systems  
• Structured query serving systems  
• Data processing systems in general  

Come As You Are

At Confluent, equality is a core tenet of our culture. We are committed to building an inclusive global team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, beliefs, and experiences. The more diverse we are, the richer our community and the broader our impact. Employment decisions are made on the basis of 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 applicable law.

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