Senior Software Engineer II - Confluent Cloud Platform (Remote)

Senior Software Engineers II at Confluent take ownership of critical backend systems that underpin our data streaming platform. You'll lead the design and delivery of large-scale, distributed services that must be secure, highly available, and easy to operate across regions and clouds.

This is a general backend role used across multiple teams. Depending on your background, you may focus on areas like core platform services, governance and metadata, observability and telemetry, security and access, or customer-facing application services. We'll align you to a team during the process based on your experience, interests, and business needs.

You'll act as a technical leader: setting direction for projects, making architecture decisions, mentoring engineers, and partnering with cross-functional stakeholders to ship high-impact work.

What You Will Do

Own and lead the design and implementation of complex backend services and systems in a cloud-native, microservices-based environment.

Make architecture and technical decisions that balance reliability, scalability, performance, and operability, and clearly communicate the tradeoffs.

Drive projects end to end: from requirements and design through implementation, rollout, and ongoing operation in production.

Improve service reliability and operations by defining SLOs/SLAs, strengthening observability, and participating in on-call as needed.

Collaborate across teams to define APIs, integration points, and data models that keep the platform coherent and evolvable.

Identify and drive platform and productivity improvements (tooling, automation, process) that raise the bar for the broader engineering organization.

Mentor and support other engineers through code reviews, design reviews, and technical guidance, helping grow the team's capabilities.

Contribute to a culture of continuous improvement, inclusive collaboration, and high technical standards.

• 7+ years of experience building, scaling, and operating production-grade backend systems.
• Strong proficiency in at least one backend language (Java, Go, C/C++, or Python) with solid fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and system design.
• Hands-on experience with distributed systems, including event-driven architectures and large-scale services, with an understanding of consistency, fault tolerance, and performance tradeoffs.
• Experience operating in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including containers (Docker, Kubernetes) and modern deployment practices.
• Proven technical leadership and strong communication skills, with the ability to drive projects, influence architecture, and collaborate effectively across teams.

Preferred technical and professional experience

Experience building or operating mission-critical, multi-tenant, or multi-region services with strict availability and latency requirements.

Familiarity with data streaming technologies such as Apache Kafka, Flink, or similar systems.

Previous work in security, governance, or compliance-sensitive backend domains.