Principal Engineer - Confluent

About the role

Employer: (0147) International Business Machines Corporation

As a Principal Software Engineer for the Cloud Architecture and Reliability (CAR) team, you will be a technical authority on ensuring our large-scale, multi-cloud data streaming platform stays up, recovers fast, and has the right operator tools to keep data flowing. You will work across all Confluent R&D teams to shape the architecture of the systems and our own tooling. As a lead engineer within the CAR team you will work with and through other team members to deliver on our mission.

Primary Responsibilities:

* Resiliency: Partner with peer teams and other leaders in CAR to define the architectural patterns and standards that create systemic resiliency for Confluent Cloud. Help teams reason about how services, dependencies, and failure domains compose end to end.
* Observability: Shape the architecture of a large-scale internal observability platform (metrics, logs, and traces) built on open standards such as OpenTelemetry and Prometheus. Make deliberate tradeoffs on cost, cardinality, signal attribution, and platform self-protection (quotas, rate limits, regional isolation), and make sure the platform itself is exceptionally reliable.
* Agentic Operator Foundations: Design and build agent-consumable operational data, tooling, and guardrails for AI-assisted triage and remediation.

Partner with Customers and Leadership: Serve as an engineering voice on reliability, resiliency, and observability requirements from regulated customers (for example financial services and public sector), and help translate regulatory and contractual expectations into engineering standards.