Principal Engineer I, Governance
$285,000–$342,000 year
RemoteUnited States
Job Summary
Define and drive company-level technical strategy for critical governance systems, ensuring long-term innovation for schema and metadata infrastructure. Architect and evolve high-performance metadata management systems that support low-latency lookups, strong consistency guarantees, and coherent behavior across streaming and processing engines. Design and evolve data protection capabilities, including encryption, access control, and schema validation, enforced consistently across the platform. Build and maintain highly available, multi-tenant infrastructure for governance services, optimizing for scalability, reliability, and resilience. Establish engineering standards, architectural patterns, and technical frameworks adopted across the organization. Partner with executives, product management, and engineering leaders to align technical vision with business objectives. Mentor senior and staff-level engineers, growing future technical leaders and shaping a culture of engineering excellence and open-source contribution. Contribute to relevant open-source projects and represent Confluent externally through technical talks and thought leadership.
Required Qualifications
- A proven track record of leading the architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems with company-level impact
- Comprehensive knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, and scalability
- Working depth with streaming or event-driven architectures
- Familiarity with adjacent domains such as schema management, data catalogs, or metadata/governance systems
- Ability to navigate ambiguity, reduce systemic complexity, and anticipate industry trends to design systems for the next 3–5 years
- Strong ability to influence executives and stakeholders while fostering a collaborative environment across multiple teams
- 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
Desired Qualifications
- Recognized industry thought leader through open-source contributions or driving initiatives from ground up
- Experience with data catalog, metadata, or governance ecosystems, or large-scale data infrastructure supporting mission-critical workloads
- Deep experience with public clouds (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and expertise in resource management and multi-tenancy in complex cloud environments
- Experience building infrastructure that serves AI or agentic workloads, particularly around metadata, context quality, or governance
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