Staff Software Engineer - Flink Control Plane

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 The Flink Platform team is at the forefront of building a robust control plane for the Flink product, leveraging advanced database storage to ensure high reliability and efficiency. With a vision centered on innovation and excellence, this team is critical to advancing Confluent's Data in Motion initiative and is committed to supplying the industry with solutions that cater to evolving stream processing demands.

What You Will Do

• Developing the control plane services that orchestrate Flink job lifecycles (submission, scaling, recovery). Building Kubernetes operators and orchestrators for serverless resource management. Designing APIs for job management, multi-tenancy, and isolation.
• Following a holistic development approach you will be responsible for the code quality, test coverage, documentation and maintainability of the components you and your team work on.
• Designing Components: You will not only implement aspects of Flink Control Plane but also draft designs, discuss them and curate and moderate a decision with involved stakeholders.
• Team: As part of the team you will help to follow and maintain processes, by being an active part of the team, leading meetings and taking initiatives where feasible and participating in on-call rotations.
• Mentoring: You will mentor other engineers with less experience in Control plane architecture to get started in the community and more junior developers to get into the area of serverless Apache Flink.

What You Will Bring

• 10+ years of relevant software development experience.
• Technical Expertise: Deep knowledge of distributed systems orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes, control loops). Experience building high-scale control planes, API servers, or cloud-native infrastructure. Knowledge of containerization, networking, and resource isolation.
• Problem Solving: Strong problem-solving skills, capable of translating complex requirements into effective solutions.
• Communication: Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to collaborate across teams.

Ready to build what's next? Let’s get in motion. Come As You Are 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.

Privacy Statement 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.

Compensation Range: $235.7K - $277K