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As a Principal Engineer, you will be a key technical leader shaping the long-term architecture, scalability, and reliability of the Tableflow project and the broader Confluent platform. You will focus on advancing key layers of Tableflow, including its multi-tenant, highly available compute infrastructure and core components responsible for table materialization and background maintenance.
Job Responsibility:
Define and drive company-level technical strategy for critical systems
Architect and evolve a high-performance, metadata management system
Design and implement innovative strategies for table schematization, materialization, and compaction at a massive scale
Build and maintain multi-tenant, highly available infrastructure for background computational tasks
Establish and evangelize engineering standards, architectural patterns, and technical frameworks
Partner with executives, product management, and engineering leaders to align technical vision with business objectives
Mentor senior and staff-level engineers
Lead contributions to relevant open-source projects like Apache Iceberg
Represent Confluent externally through technical talks and thought leadership
Requirements:
Deep expertise in leading architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed storage systems with company-level impact
Comprehensive knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, scalability, and cloud-native platforms
Ability to navigate extreme ambiguity, reduce systemic complexity, and anticipate industry trends to design systems for the next 3–5 years
Strong ability to influence executives and stakeholders while fostering a collaborative environment across multiple teams
Demonstrated ability to move from high-level vision to detailed technical implementation and delivery
Nice to have:
Industry leadership through open-source contributions (e.g., Apache Kafka, Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink) or published research
Expertise in storage internals, runtime systems, or large-scale data infrastructure supporting mission-critical workloads
Deep experience with public clouds (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and expertise in resource management and multi-tenancy in complex cloud environments