Senior Engineering Manager, Flink Control Plane

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: The Flink Platform team is at the forefront of building a robust, serverless control plane for Confluent’s fully managed Flink offering. As the Senior Engineering Manager, you will lead a high-impact team of approximately 10 engineers—including two Staff-level individual contributors—responsible for the "brain" of our streaming service. You will own the customer-facing Flink REST API and Gateway, the Kubernetes operators that orchestrate Flink job lifecycles (submission, scaling, recovery), and the declarative API server that backs them – the stack every Flink customer interaction flows through. Your team is responsible for multi-tenant isolation, end-to-end reliability, and the integration points between Confluent's global control plane and the regional Flink data plane. This is a critical leadership role where you will balance deep technical strategy–driving architectural excellence and reliability–with a strong focus on people leadership, specifically growing a talented group of senior engineers into the next generation of Staff-level leaders. WHAT YOU WILL DO: - Vision & Execution: Own the overall roadmap and execution for the Flink Control Plane. Define the strategy for job orchestration (submission, scaling, recovery) and serverless resource management. - Architectural Leadership: Lead the ongoing migration of the control plane onto Confluent's latest platform foundations and drive major component refactors in service of reliability, security, and scale. You will "see around corners" – making the right bets on architecture today so the platform stays resilient as Flink usage grows by orders of magnitude. - Engineering Excellence: Work with engineering teams and product management on critical aspects of product definition, architectural design, and delivery. Influence the overall domain health and operational hygiene for the platform. - Scale & Performance: Drive the control plane's evolution to support 10x growth in compute pools, statements, and tenants per region. Lead initiatives that eliminate hotspots in the metadata and orchestration layers so customer-facing operations remain fast and predictable under load. - People Development: Manage and coach a diverse team. Your primary mission is to mentor junior and mid-level developers, providing them with the architectural context and leadership skills to reach Staff levels. - Collaboration: Work closely with engineering leadership and key stakeholders across Confluent Cloud to drive cross-team efforts to solve complex distributed system challenges at scale – strong cross-org partnership is core to the role. - Operational Integrity: Lead the team in maintaining high code quality, comprehensive test coverage, and a robust on-call rotation, ensuring the control plane meets enterprise-grade reliability standards. WHAT YOU WILL BRING: - Experience: 10+ years in software development with at least 5+ years in engineering management, specifically leading teams focused on cloud-native infrastructure or managed services. - Technical Depth: Deep knowledge of distributed systems orchestration (Kubernetes operators, controller patterns, declarative API servers) and multi-tenant resource isolation. Experience scaling control planes for managed cloud services (AWS, GCP, Azure, Elastic, Snowflake, Databricks, etc.) is highly preferred. Direct Flink experience is not required. - Leadership Track Record: A proven track record of hiring while ensuring a high bar, keeping engineers motivated through complex technical transitions, and managing performance effectively. - Focus on Reliability: A mindset geared toward "Operational Excellence." You understand how to build and maintain resilient, enduring technical foundations that serve as a central component for other teams to build upon. - Communication: Exceptional ability to influence peers and upper management using data-driven, collaborative techniques and clear written/verbal communication. 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/.