[Hiring] Staff Software Engineer I – Control Plane Core Infrastructure @Confluent

Role Description

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud. In this role you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform. You’ll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and cross‑team leadership, identifying high‑leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact.

What You Will Do:

• Own end‑to‑end architecture and delivery of complex control‑plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, data models) that support Confluent Cloud products.
• Lead open‑ended technical initiatives: take ambiguous problems, clarify requirements, define the approach, and drive execution across teams and services.
• Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout/rollback patterns.
• Collaborate across orgs (Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE and others) to align on designs, trade‑offs, and long‑term platform direction.
• Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels; provide high‑quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team.
• Continuously improve developer experience for our control‑plane stack (tooling, automation, CI/CD, test strategy) to remove toil and increase velocity.
• Influence technical strategy in your domain: identify high‑impact opportunities, propose roadmaps, and help prioritize work aligned with business goals.
• Contribute to engineering culture via documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing (internal talks, wikis, or external content where appropriate).

Qualifications

• Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production.
• Deep hands‑on experience with distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, scalability).
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud‑native architectures.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms.
• Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java or Scala, and comfort working across services, infrastructure, and automation.
• Able to define end‑to‑end designs, break them into milestones, de‑risk early, and land them on time with high quality.
• Think in terms of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response; design for safe change and graceful degradation.
• Write clear design docs, explain trade‑offs crisply, and can lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders (engineers, PMs, leadership).
• Successfully led cross‑team projects, influenced technical direction beyond your immediate code, and helped others level up.
• Care about customer impact, reliability, long‑term maintainability, and helping the team win, not just shipping features.

Requirements

• Experience building control‑plane systems (APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, provisioning/orchestration workflows).
• Background with Apache Kafka or other streaming/data systems.
• Prior work on multi‑region, high‑availability, or disaster‑recovery architectures.
• Experience in security‑sensitive infrastructure (identity, certificates, secrets, mTLS, policy) or compliance‑driven environments.
• Contributions to open source projects, public talks, or technical blogs in relevant areas.

Benefits

• 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.
• 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.