Principal Engineer I, Governance

Job description

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 Confluent's Data Streaming Platform is only as trustworthy as the schemas, metadata, and policies that govern it. As more of the platform's value shifts toward real-time processing and AI-driven decisioning, the systems that keep data well-formed, reliable, discoverable, and compliant, from the moment it's produced through every downstream consumer, become as critical to correctness as the storage and compute layers themselves. The governance layer and the stream catalog integrates the Data Streaming Platform into a unified, intuitive and intelligent product to serve the critical real-time use cases for our customers. Confluent Schema Registry - a foundational building block for streaming governance is a widely adopted infrastructure in the industry supporting over 4 Million schemas across 60K customer facing clusters with throughputs as high as 5K reqs/sec for some use cases. Solving complex distributed systems challenges at this scale is one of the core dimensions of this role. As a Principal Engineer, you will be a key technical leader shaping the long-term architecture, scalability, and reliability of Confluent's schema and metadata governance systems, and their integration across the broader Confluent Streaming Platform. You will focus on advancing the core layers of Stream Governance, including highly available, multi-tenant infrastructure and the systems responsible for schema management, data policy enforcement, and metadata consistency at scale. You will own company-level technical domains, set direction for critical initiatives, and influence both engineering practices and product strategy. This role requires operating with autonomy in highly ambiguous spaces, making decisions that balance technical depth with business impact to ensure reliability and scalability for governance services across all of Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform. WHAT YOU WILL DO - Technical Strategy & Leadership: Define and drive company-level technical strategy for critical governance systems, ensuring long-term innovation for schema and metadata infrastructure. - Metadata Architecture & Lifecycle Management: Architect and evolve high-performance metadata management systems that support low-latency lookups, strong consistency guarantees, and coherent behavior across streaming and processing engines. - Data Policy & Governance Systems: Design and evolve data protection capabilities — including encryption, access control, and schema validation — enforced consistently across the platform. - Platform Engineering: Build and maintain highly available, multi-tenant infrastructure for governance services, ensuring the platform is optimized for scalability, reliability, and resilience. - Architectural Excellence: Establish and evangelize engineering standards, architectural patterns, and technical frameworks adopted across the organization. - Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with executives, product management, and engineering leaders across the platform to align technical vision with business objectives — working across team boundaries to build consensus on shared architecture decisions you don't have direct authority over. - Mentorship & Culture: Mentor senior and staff-level engineers, growing future technical leaders and shaping a culture of engineering excellence and open-source contribution. - Open-Source & External Representation: Contribute to relevant open-source projects and represent Confluent externally through technical talks and thought leadership. WHAT YOU WILL BRING - Deep Expertise: A proven track record of leading the architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems with company-level impact. - Distributed Systems Mastery: Comprehensive knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, scalability, and cloud-native platforms. - Streaming Architecture Fluency: Working depth with streaming or event-driven architectures, and familiarity with adjacent domains such as schema management, data catalogs, or metadata/governance systems. - Strategic Influence: Ability to navigate ambiguity, reduce systemic complexity, and anticipate industry trends to design systems for the next 3–5 years. - Leadership Presence: Strong ability to influence executives and stakeholders while fostering a collaborative environment across multiple teams. - Execution: Demonstrated ability to move from high-level vision to detailed technical implementation and delivery, with a strong bias toward shipped, adopted outcomes over theoretical design. WHAT GIVES YOU AN EDGE - Industry Leadership: Recognized industry thought leader through open-source contributions or driving initiatives from ground up. - Advanced Domain Knowledge: Experience with data catalog, metadata, or governance ecosystems, or large-scale data infrastructure supporting mission-critical workloads. - Cloud Infrastructure: Deep experience with public clouds (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and expertise in resource management and multi-tenancy in complex cloud environments. - AI-Adjacent Systems: Experience building infrastructure that serves AI or agentic workloads, particularly around metadata, context quality, or governance. 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. More Information on how IBM protects your personal information, including the safeguards in case of cross-border data transfer, are available here http://ibm.com/careers/us-en/privacy-policy/.