About the Role:

We seek an engineering leader to manage a high-performing and dynamic team responsible for building, maintaining, and scaling the Confluent Stream Catalog and Confluent Stream Sharing products. These technologies are critical components of Confluent’s Stream Governance offering, empowering organizations to manage and govern streaming data efficiently. The team also owns the Stream Catalog GraphQL API, Data Portal, and Stream Lineage products, delivering essential capabilities that help customers discover, track, and share real-time data streams.

Governance is one of the fastest-growing areas of Confluent’s business, presenting numerous opportunities for innovation and technical leadership. Your role will be instrumental in guiding the team’s strategy, ensuring high-quality product execution, and fostering a collaborative environment that encourages both technical excellence and strong business impact.

What You Will Do:

• Lead the strategic vision, roadmap, and execution for Confluent Stream Catalog, Stream Sharing, and related governance products, ensuring alignment with business objectives.

• Collaborate closely with product management, design, and other engineering teams to define product requirements, technical strategy, and architectural direction.

• Drive the development of cloud-native, highly scalable, multi-tenant services that meet the demanding needs of Confluent’s customers.

• Establish and enforce best practices in data governance, security, and operational excellence for our core governance products.

• Manage and mentor a team of engineers, providing technical leadership, career development, and performance management.

• Champion engineering excellence, fostering a culture of high-quality software development, effective testing, and operational reliability.

• Partner with stakeholders across Confluent to drive adoption and growth of governance products by continuously improving their capabilities and usability.

• Monitor and optimize the stability, performance, and efficiency of governance services operating in AWS, GCP, and Azure.

• Influence and contribute to broader Confluent engineering initiatives, ensuring governance services integrate seamlessly with the Data Streaming Platform.

What You Will Bring:

• 10+ years of experience in software development, with 2+ years in an engineering management role.

• Expertise in distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and data governance technologies.

• Experience in designing, building, and scaling large-scale, real-time data systems.

• Deep knowledge of metadata management and data lineage concepts.

• Proven track record of leading engineering teams in fast-paced, high-growth environments.

• Ability to influence and collaborate effectively across engineering, product, and business teams.

• Experience running production services in the cloud, ensuring high availability and reliability.

• Strong technical vision and execution skills, with a focus on prioritization, efficiency, and results-driven leadership.

• Ability to hire while ensuring a high hiring bar, motivate engineers, coach/mentor, and manage performance.

• An excellent track record of timely shipping features, a sense of urgency, an aggressive mindset toward achieving results, and excellent prioritization skills.

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.

What Gives You an Edge:

• Experience in data governance, data cataloging, or metadata management.

• Prior experience in Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, or similar streaming and data management technologies, as well as experience with technical and business catalogs.

• Knowledge of API governance frameworks and cloud security best practices.

• Passion for building developer-friendly platforms and fostering an engaging engineering culture.