Principal Engineer, Tableflow

Confluent is a company focused on transforming how data moves and is utilized. The Principal Engineer will lead the technical strategy and architecture for the Tableflow project, ensuring high availability and scalability while collaborating across teams and mentoring future technical leaders.

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