Senior Manager - Engineering

Job description

We’re not just building better tech. We’re rewriting how data moves and what the world can do with it. With Confluent, data doesn’t sit still. Our platform puts information in motion, streaming in near real-time so companies can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them.

It takes a certain kind of person to join this team. Those who ask hard questions, give honest feedback, and show up for each other. No egos, no solo acts. Just smart, curious humans pushing toward something bigger, together.

One Confluent. One Team. One Data Streaming Platform.

About the Role:

As a Senior Manager, Engineering you will build, lead, and grow a high-performing engineering organization responsible for one of Confluent's most critical services. This role demands a unique blend of deep technical expertise and strong leadership—you must drive both the strategic vision for a large-scale, real-time analytics platform AND execute flawlessly on operational excellence.

Your immediate focus will be on:

1. Scaling for Growth: Leading the technical strategy to scale our metrics infrastructure to handle 10x data volume over the next 2 years

2. API Evolution: Driving the roadmap for new metrics datasets, query capabilities, and integration patterns

3. Operational Excellence: Ensuring 99.99%+ availability, sub-second query performance, and seamless incident response

4. Cross-Team Collaboration: Partnering with multiple teams across Telemetry, Cloud Infrastructure, and Product to deliver end-to-end observability solutions

What You Will Do:

• Drive execution on complex projects, dive deep, make tradeoffs and deliver a delightful experience for our customers.

• Look ahead and drive the direction of the product working with the Product team.

• Lead & Mentor: Grow, coach, and nurture a high-performance team. You will be responsible for hiring, performance management, and keeping a high bar for talent.

• Create an environment where engineers can do their best work—through clear expectations, coaching, feedback, and career development.

• Foster Operational Excellence: Champion a strong culture of ownership and continuous improvement. You will lead effective root cause analyses and implement corrective actions to improve the security, reliability, and performance of your services.

• Collaborate & Influence: Work closely with product management, engineering leadership, and stakeholders across Confluent. You will align roadmaps and foster strong partnerships to solve complex challenges that cross organizational boundaries.

What You Will Bring:

• 14+ years of overall experience in software development and engineering

• 4+ years of engineering management experience, leading productive, high-performing teams

• Experience operating large-scale distributed systems in production environments (preferably cloud-native)

• Leadership & Management Skills

  • Demonstrated ability to hire and retain top engineering talent, provide impactful coaching, and drive high-performance results.

  • Proven track record of shipping features consistently and meeting aggressive deadlines with a high degree of urgency.

  • Exceptional prioritization skills with the ability to balance short-term execution with a long-term strategic vision for technical evolution.

  • Exceptional communication and collaboration skills, with a focus on building a positive, inclusive team culture aligned with organizational goals.

• Technical Expertise

  • Solid fundamentals in distributed systems design, replication protocols, and high-availability production operations.

  • Deep familiarity with Kafka or similar high-scale event streaming platforms (Pulsar, Flink, etc.) in cloud environments.

  • Experience operating complex architectures across large public clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure) or private cloud-native infrastructures.

  • Strong engineering background with a hands-on approach to technology and a passion for architectural deep-dives.

Ready to build what's next? Let’s get in motion.

Belonging isn’t a perk here. It’s the baseline. We work across time zones and backgrounds, knowing the best ideas come from different perspectives. And we make space for everyone to lead, grow, and challenge what’s possible.

We’re proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. Employment decisions are based on job-related criteria, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other classification protected by law.

Confluent is an IBM subsidiary which has been acquired by IBM and will be integrated into the IBM organization. By proceeding with this application, you understand that Confluent will share your personal information with other IBM affiliates involved in your recruitment process, wherever these are located. More Information on how IBM protects your personal information, including the safeguards in case of cross-border data transfer, are available here.