Confluent - Principal Engineer - Stream Governance

Introduction

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Confluent's Data Streaming Platform is only as trustworthy as the schemas, metadata, and policies that govern it. As more of the platform's value shifts toward real-time processing and AI-driven decisioning, the systems that keep data well-formed, reliable, discoverable, and compliant, from the moment it's produced through every downstream consumer, become as critical to correctness as the storage and compute layers themselves.

The governance layer and the stream catalog integrates the Data Streaming Platform into a unified, intuitive and intelligent product to serve the critical real-time use cases for our customers.

Confluent Schema Registry - a foundational building block for streaming governance is a widely adopted infrastructure in the industry supporting over 4 Million schemas across 60K customer facing clusters with through puts as high as 5K reqs/sec for some use cases. Solving complex distributed systems challenges at this scale is one of the core dimensions of this role.

As a Principal Engineer, you will be a key technical leader shaping the long-term architecture, scalability, and reliability of Confluent's schema and metadata governance systems, and their integration across the broader Confluent Streaming Platform. You will focus on advancing the core layers of Stream Governance, including highly available, multi-tenant infrastructure and the systems responsible for schema management, data policy enforcement, and metadata consistency at scale.

You will own company-level technical domains, set direction for critical initiatives, and influence both engineering practices and product strategy. This role requires operating with autonomy in highly ambiguous spaces, making decisions that balance technical depth with business impact to ensure reliability and scalability for governance services across all of Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform.

• Technical Strategy & Leadership:
  Define and drive company-level technical strategy for critical governance systems, ensuring long-term innovation for schema and metadata infrastructure.
• Metadata Architecture & Lifecycle Management:
  Architect and evolve high-performance metadata management systems that support low-latency lookups, strong consistency guarantees, and coherent behavior across streaming and processing engines.
• Data Policy & Governance Systems:
  Design and evolve data protection capabilities — including encryption, access control, and schema validation — enforced consistently across the platform.
• Platform Engineering:
  Build and maintain highly available, multi-tenant infrastructure for governance services, ensuring the platform is optimized for scalability, reliability, and resilience.
• Architectural Excellence:
  Establish and evangelize engineering standards, architectural patterns, and technical frameworks adopted across the organization.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration:
  
  Partner with executives,…