Principal Engineer - Confluent

Introduction

At IBM Software, we turn client challenges into practical solutions. We build the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that help shape the future of business and society. With a long-standing record of innovation, IBMers have countless opportunities to learn, grow, and create meaningful impact at a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team driven by curiosity and collaboration. You’ll work with a wide range of technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that enable digital transformation. Supported by a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the center of IBM’s product and technology ecosystem. You’ll gain the tools and opportunities to advance your career while building software that changes the world.

Your Role And Responsibilities

About the job

Confluent is not just building better technology—we’re changing how data moves and what the world can do with it. With Confluent, data doesn’t remain static. Our platform moves information in near real-time, helping companies respond sooner, build more effectively, and deliver experiences that are as dynamic as the world itself.

This team needs people who ask difficult questions, provide candid feedback, and show up for one another. There’s no room for ego or solo action—just smart, curious engineers working together toward something bigger.

One Confluent. One Team. One Data Streaming Platform.

About The Role

We are building the Kafka Connect charter, which is essential for scalable and reliable streaming data between Apache Kafka® and other data systems. It enables fast definition of connectors that move large data sets into and out of Kafka. Kafka Connect can ingest entire databases or collect metrics from application servers into Kafka topics, making the data available for stream processing with low latency. An export connector can deliver data from Kafka topics into secondary indexes such as Elasticsearch, or into batch systems—like Hadoop—for offline analysis.

We are seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the technical vision, architecture, execution, and operations of core engineering teams that build Confluent’s industry-leading Kafka Connectors. As an IC leader for this product line, you will be responsible for guiding the world-class Connect team in driving innovation and staying ahead of competitors.

What You Will Do

• Work with a strong team of engineers to help evolve Confluent Connect. Work closely with product management, engineering leadership, and other key stakeholders across various teams in Confluent to build and drive the overall roadmap.
• Drive the long-term direction and strategy of Confluent Kafka connectors, while partnering with internal stakeholders to drive the team's mission forward
• Drive the technical charter for Connect, and create competitive advantages for Kafka connectors through innovation. Drive improvements in the Kafka connectors to make them more usable and powerful for customers, and make them easier to adopt and scale.
• Mentor a team of high-performing engineers and leads, helping them continue growing their skill set through hands-on experience and mentorship. Provide timely and productive feedback, encourage a growth mindset, and advise team members in defining and working toward personal development goals.
• Build a culture of continuous improvement and prioritize large, high-impact initiatives that will fundamentally change Kafka connectors.
• Serve as a strong technical leader and engineering representative for teams in India. Strengthen a culture of excellence by focusing on hiring, communication, execution, and work quality. Create and manage processes that help the team produce its best work.
• Maintain a strong growth trajectory by hiring top-tier engineers, and establish quality standards, design principles, and operational maturity for the team
  
  

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• Minimum of 15+ years of hands-on software development experience with the ability to anticipate future technical needs for the product and craft plans to realize them.
• Taking ideas to production is something we look for. Ready to roll up your sleeves - code, debug, design - do whatever it takes to ship the product to production.
• Experience building and operating large-scale systems. Experience running production services in public clouds.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development.
• A self starter with the ability to work effectively in teams. Proactively identifying the symptoms of technical issues and reason about their causes is needed. This will be followed by fixing the root causes.
• Timely shipping of deliverables; being able to trade-off short term technical decisions with the long term. Move fast, build in increments, and iterate. A sense of urgency, a mindset towards achieving results, and excellent prioritization skills.
• Ability to influence the team, peers and upper management in technology decisions using effective communication and collaborative techniques
• Strong mentorship track record, guiding the team in building out complex systems, and helping them in their professional development.
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent experience. Understanding of various technologies, programming paradigms and frameworks is needed. Ability to be pragmatic and trade off their usage in production is essential.
• Ability to take on intense customer production issues on-call; debugging and mitigating them will be needed. This requires patient log and metrics analysis with solid reasoning to nail the issue.