Staff Software Engineer I - Control Plane Core Infrastructure

About

In this role you drive the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure powering Confluent Cloud. You’ll shape architecture across services, leading cross‑team initiatives with a focus on reliability and observability. You work closely with Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, and SRE teams to align designs with long‑term platform direction. You help the team win by mentoring engineers, improving developer experience, and delivering durable, high‑quality systems. A strong hook is your impact on a globally distributed data streaming platform, from architecture to production readiness.

Benefits

• Own end‑to‑end architecture and delivery of complex control‑plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, data models) for Confluent Cloud
• Lead open‑ended technical initiatives, clarifying requirements and driving execution across teams
• Increase reliability and observability with well‑defined SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout/rollback patterns
• Collaborate across orgs to align on designs and long‑term platform direction
• Mentor engineers and provide high‑quality design and code reviews
• Improve developer experience for the control‑plane stack (tooling, automation, CI/CD, testing)
• Influence technical strategy, propose roadmaps, and prioritize work
• Contribute to engineering culture through documentation and knowledge sharing

Requirements

• 6+ years of software engineering experience delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production
• Experience with distributed systems design, data modeling, and scalability
• Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud‑native architectures
• Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms
• Proficiency in Go, Java, or Scala
• Ability to define end‑to‑end designs and drive them to completion
• Operational mindset with emphasis on SLOs, observability, incident response
• Strong communication skills and ability to lead discussions with diverse stakeholders
• Experience leading cross‑team projects and influencing technical direction
• Customer impact and reliability oriented mindset