Software Engineer I

About The Company
Confluent is a leading data streaming platform that revolutionizes how data moves and is utilized across organizations. Committed to innovation, Confluent enables businesses to harness the power of real-time data streaming, allowing for faster reactions, smarter decision-making, and dynamic customer experiences. The company’s platform is designed to handle high-volume, low-latency data streams, providing a unified solution for data integration, processing, and analytics. As part of its mission, Confluent emphasizes a collaborative, inclusive culture where diverse perspectives drive technological advancements and organizational growth. With a focus on cloud-native solutions, Confluent serves a broad spectrum of enterprise clients, helping them leverage data as a strategic asset in an increasingly digital world.
About The Role
We are seeking a highly skilled Software Engineer to join our Compute Platform team. In this pivotal role, you will be instrumental in designing, developing, and maintaining Confluent’s next-generation, multi-tenant, cloud-native compute infrastructure that supports a wide array of workloads within Confluent Cloud. Your expertise will help orchestrate workloads across thousands of Kubernetes clusters globally, ensuring seamless operation, security, and scalability. You will be responsible for building control planes that manage workload placement, lifecycle, and state across multiple regions and cloud providers, as well as developing APIs and abstractions that facilitate polyglot workload management. Additionally, you will work on deep cloud platform integrations, multi-tenancy security, observability, and operational excellence initiatives. As a senior technical leader, you will influence architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and drive strategic technical initiatives to elevate our platform’s capabilities, reliability, and security for enterprise customers.
Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience delivering scalable and reliable software solutions
• Proven track record in leading large-scale, high-availability, low-latency systems
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes, including controller development, operator patterns, and multi-cluster architectures
• Strong proficiency in Go programming language with experience building production-grade distributed systems
• Experience with multi-tenant platform architectures and security isolation patterns
• Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, and API design for internal platform services
• Hands-on experience with observability tools and operational excellence practices
• Experience working in multi-cloud environments such as AWS, GCP, and Azure, including cloud-provider integrations
• Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineering teams
• Strong collaborative skills working with product management, SRE, and cross-functional teams
• Excellent problem-solving skills and a proactive approach to innovation and continuous improvement

Responsibilities

• Drive the overall technical strategy for the Compute Platform, including multi-cluster orchestration, workload placement, and security architecture
• Design and implement platform APIs and Kubernetes operators using Go to support evolving workload requirements
• Collaborate with product management and engineering leadership to define and execute the roadmap for Confluent’s Compute Platform
• Develop high-impact features such as workload scheduling, disruption management, network isolation, and cross-cluster resource management
• Lead technical design reviews and make architectural decisions across teams and organizational boundaries
• Mentor and guide other engineers through code reviews, technical discussions, and best practices
• Manage operational aspects including system availability, reliability, performance monitoring, emergency response, and disaster recovery for global compute infrastructure
• Ensure platform security, scalability, and compliance with industry standards
• Contribute to continuous improvement initiatives to optimize platform performance and operational efficiency

Benefits

• Competitive salary range of $197.4K - $232K with equity options
• Remote work flexibility within the United States
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance plans
• Generous paid time off and holidays
• Opportunities for professional development and continuous learning
• Collaborative and inclusive work environment that values diversity
• Participation in innovative projects at the forefront of data streaming technology
• Flexible work schedules supporting work-life balance

Equal Opportunity
Confluent is an equal opportunity workplace. Employment decisions are made based on job-related criteria without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected class. We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where everyone can lead, grow, and challenge what’s possible.