Principal Engineer, Tableflow

Confluent is a company focused on transforming how data moves with their innovative streaming platform. As a Principal Engineer, you will lead the architecture and scalability of the Tableflow project, ensuring high availability and reliability while collaborating with cross-functional teams and mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive company-level technical strategy for critical systems, ensuring long-term innovation for Tableflow’s storage and metadata engines
• Architect and evolve a high-performance, metadata management system that supports low latency updates and efficient query planning
• 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, ensuring the platform is optimized for scalability, reliability, and resilience
• Establish and evangelize engineering standards, architectural patterns, and technical frameworks adopted across the organization
• Partner with executives, product management, and engineering leaders to align technical vision with business objectives
• Mentor senior and staff-level engineers, growing future technical leaders and shaping a culture of engineering excellence and open-source contribution
• Lead contributions to relevant open-source projects like Apache Iceberg and represent Confluent externally through technical talks and thought leadership

Requirements:

• A proven track record of leading the 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
• Recognized industry thought leader 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