Introduction
At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world.
Your role and responsibilities
About the RoleConfluent'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 throughputs 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.
What You Will Do- 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, product management, and engineering leaders across the platform to align technical vision with business objectives - working across team boundaries to build consensus on shared architecture decisions you don't have direct authority over.
- Mentorship & Culture: Mentor senior and staff-level engineers, growing future technical leaders and shaping a culture of engineering excellence and open-source contribution.
- Open-Source & External Representation: Contribute to relevant open-source projects and represent Confluent externally through technical talks and thought leadership.
Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
- Deep Expertise: A proven track record of leading the architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems with company-level impact.
- Distributed Systems Mastery: Comprehensive knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, scalability, and cloud-native platforms.
- Streaming Architecture Fluency: Working depth with streaming or event-driven architectures, and familiarity with adjacent domains such as schema management, data catalogs, or metadata/governance systems.
- Strategic Influence: Ability to navigate ambiguity, reduce systemic complexity, and anticipate industry trends to design systems for the next 3-5 years.
- Leadership Presence: Strong ability to influence executives and stakeholders while fostering a collaborative environment across multiple teams.
- Execution: Demonstrated ability to move from high-level vision to detailed technical implementation and delivery, with a strong bias toward shipped, adopted outcomes over theoretical design.
Preferred technical and professional experience
- Industry Leadership: Recognized industry thought leader through open-source contributions or driving initiatives from ground up.
- Advanced Domain Knowledge: Experience with data catalog, metadata, or governance ecosystems, or large-scale data infrastructure supporting mission-critical workloads.
- Cloud Infrastructure: Deep experience with public clouds (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform) and expertise in resource management and multi-tenancy in complex cloud environments.
- AI-Adjacent Systems: Experience building infrastructure that serves AI or agentic workloads, particularly around metadata, context quality, or governance.
ABOUT BUSINESS UNITIBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence-from machine learning to generative AI-to help make organizations more responsive, productive, and resilient. IBM Software helps clients put AI into action now to create real value with trust, speed, and confidence across digital labor, IT automation, application modernization, security, and sustainability. Critical to this is the ability to make use of all data, because AI is only as good as the data that fuels it. In most organizations data is spread across multiple clouds, on premises, in private datacenters, and at the edge. IBM's AI and data platform scales and accelerates the impact of AI with trusted data, and provides leading capabilities to train, tune and deploy AI across business. IBM's hybrid cloud platform is one of the most comprehensive and consistent approach to development, security, and operations across hybrid environments-a flexible foundation for leveraging data, wherever it resides, to extend AI deep into a business.
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Being an IBMer means you'll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you'll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.
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OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILSIBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to:
- Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being
- Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs
- Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law
- Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals
- Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences
We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law.
This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role.
The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
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