Senior Software Engineer I - Confluent

Your Role and Responsibilities:

• Own the execution and delivery of projects within a ksqlDB product
• Build strong, subdomain-level expertise (pull queries, state stores, elastic scaling, SQL language, etc.) and confidently field questions from partners/stakeholders in that area.
• Contribute meaningful input in design discussions; demonstrate technical leadership by reviewing others’ work and suggesting architectural improvements.
• Ship features and fixes with the customer in mind; proactively flag and pursue improvements to how ksqlDB serves streaming-SQL use cases.
• Participate in on-call/incident response - diagnose and resolve customer-impacting issues, write/maintain runbooks, and drive retrospectives that reduce operational toil.
• Contribute to team OKRs and collaborate cross-functionally (Kafka Streams, Cloud Control Plane, Product/PM) so technical work maps to business needs.
• Mentor junior/early-career engineers, actively participate in code review, and contribute to interviewing as the team scales.

Required Education:

Bachelor’s Degree

Preferred Education:

Master’s Degree

Required Technical and Professional Expertise:

• Strong Java proficiency - the ksqlDB/Kafka Streams codebase is JVM-based - with a solid grounding in data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and distributed-systems fundamentals.
• 3-6 years of professional software engineering experience building and operating backend/distributed systems in production.
• Ability to design, test (unit/integration), and debug features inside a large, established codebase, following existing architecture and code-health practices.
• Familiarity with cloud-native operations: containers/Kubernetes, observability (metrics/logs/traces), and on-call practices.

Solid written/verbal communication - clear design docs, constructive code review, cross-functional collaboration

Preferred Technical and Professional Experience:

• Prior hands-on experience with Kafka, Kafka Streams, or with competing streaming-SQL/database engines is a plus.
• Experience with distributed consensus, state management (e.g., RocksDB-backed state stores), or elastic/auto-scaling distributed systems.
• Exposure to database internals - query planning/optimization, transaction/consistency models - relevant to ksqlDB’s push toward being a true streaming database (pull-query consistency guarantees).
• Experience operating a multi-tenant SaaS control plane (Confluent Cloud or similar).

Some track record of mentoring or leading small technical initiatives

**Years of Experience:**4 - 7