Senior Software Engineer II - Confluent

Required technical and professional expertise

• At least 6 years of professional software engineering experience building and operating cloud services, platforms, or large-scale distributed systems.
• Technical & Platform Depth – Strong fundamentals in distributed systems and reliability; proficiency in at least one statically typed language (e.g., Java, Go) plus a scripting language (e.g., Python); experience with DevProd tooling such as CI/CD, containers, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Execution & Ownership – Demonstrated ability to independently drive projects from design through rollout, breaking work into milestones, managing risk, and delivering high-quality outcomes on time.
• Collaboration & Leadership – Strong written and verbal communication skills; experience mentoring other engineers, leading design and code reviews, and influencing cross-functional stakeholders in a platform setting.
• Operational Excellence – Proven track record owning services in production or critical pre‑prod environments, including on-call, incident response, and postmortems, with a strong bias towards automation to reduce toil and improve reliability.
• AI Awareness – Practical experience or strong interest in integrating AI/ML or LLM-based capabilities into developer or platform workflows, along with an understanding of how to design sensible guardrails and instrumentation for safe use. You don’t need to be an AI expert, but you’re comfortable evaluating and adopting new tools.
• Education & Experience – BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related field (or equivalent experience), and