About the role

Staff Software Engineer I leading design of core control-plane infrastructure for Confluent Cloud. Collaborating across teams to enhance system reliability and architecture.

Responsibilities

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).

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 at least some of: Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, scalability).
Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native architectures.
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.
You think in terms of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response; you design for safe change and graceful degradation.
You write clear design docs, explain trade-offs crisply, and can lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders (engineers, PMs, leadership).
You’ve successfully led cross-team projects, influenced technical direction beyond your immediate code, and helped others level up.
You care about customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and helping the team win, not just shipping features.