Principal Engineer (Confluent Control Plane)

Location: Remote within the United States, with locations including Poughkeepsie, Lowell, Rochester, Tucson, Research Triangle Park, Armonk, Durham, Raleigh, Boston, Bellevue, Atlanta, Santa Monica, San Jose, Santa Clara, Dallas, Austin, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York. Some travel may be required based on business demand.

Salary: $192,000–$358,000 per year.

Company

IBM Software develops AI-powered, cloud-native, hybrid-cloud, and data platforms for business and enterprise clients.

What you will do

• Set and communicate the long-term technical vision for the Confluent Cloud Control Plane.
• Lead large-scale, cross-organizational projects from design through delivery while remaining hands-on with code and systems.
• Improve quality, availability, resilience, scalability, and development and operational processes.
• Promote effective and responsible use of AI throughout the development lifecycle.
• Coach and mentor engineers and technical leaders while fostering a supportive engineering culture.
• Partner with engineering and product teams to shape strategy, architecture, and the Confluent Cloud resource-management roadmap.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree.
• Extensive experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, including globally distributed, highly available systems.
• Strong understanding of distributed-systems fundamentals, including consistency, coordination, performance, operational characteristics, and real-world deployment conditions.
• Experience setting technical strategy, partnering across engineering and product teams, and executing roadmaps.
• Strong customer focus and the ability to work closely with product teams to shape the overall roadmap.
• Collaborative leadership approach and strong communication skills.

Nice to have

• Experience building multi-cloud systems, cloud control planes, or distributed key-value stores or databases.
• Understanding and real-world experience with Kubernetes internals or contributions to the Kubernetes codebase.
• Experience building and operating systems with AI-driven tools and approaches.
• Experience with data-streaming systems such as Kafka and Flink.

Culture & Benefits

• Regular employment with a full-time schedule and daytime shift.
• Healthcare, dental, vision, mental-health, life-insurance, disability, and financial programs including 401(k) and pension benefits may be available to eligible employees.
• Paid holidays, sick time, vacation, parental bonding leave, and other paid-care leave programs.
• AI-driven learning resources, training, educational support, and industry-recognized certification opportunities.
• Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, volunteer opportunities, and retail and service discounts.