---
title: 'Principal Engineer, Engineering AI Productivity at Confluent'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/principal-engineer-engineering-ai-productivity-confluent-united-states-3ms5wqdk5cz0'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-07'
---

# Principal Engineer, Engineering AI Productivity at Confluent

- **Company:** Confluent
- **Location:** United States
- **Compensation:** $285k–$342k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-05-13
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/confluent/85107937-8f12-4336-abb8-e88f344c6bcc

## 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: We’re seeking a strategic and hands-on technical leader to define and drive Confluent’s internal agentic AI capabilities, and adoption of smart, automated decisioning systems for R&D productivity. In this role, you will partner across Engineering, Security, and IT to scale AI usage across our platform to accelerate value for customers and the business.

You will operationalize a vision where AI augments developers, automates routine tasks, and orchestrates intelligent workflows that unlock new usage patterns.

What You Will Do:

- Strategy & Vision
- Define and evangelize the AI and agentic flows strategy — aligning business metrics, engineering needs, and platform opportunities.
- Build a roadmap for introducing agentic automation features, smart assistants, and AI-driven workflows across all aspects of engineering.
- Identify and resolve bottlenecks across the entire product and software development life cycle.
- Cross-Functional Leadership
- Partner with Engineering, Trust and Security to integrate AI capabilities responsibly and at scale.
- Operationalize AI adoption internally and share use cases externally
- Drive complex cross-team projects requiring multi-stakeholder alignment
- Continuously raise the bar for code/architectural quality across engineering
- Execution & Delivery
- Lead the delivery of core agentic workflows that improves productivity across engineering
- Balance of hands-on contributions with effective delegation to others. Expect 60% execution and 40% strategy setting.
- Drive measurable adoption of AI tooling and flows with internal teams
- Governance & Best Practices
- Ability to adopt industry standards, ethical frameworks, guardrails, and quality metrics for AI behavior and automated flows.
- Define success metrics and KPIs (e.g., AI-driven usage lift, automation ROI, reduction in manual workflows).
- Thought Leadership
- Participate in external forums — conferences, podcasts, customer briefings on occasion
- Evolve as the technology landscape shifts
- Write internal playbooks for building and scaling agentic outcomes.

What You Will Bring:

- Technical and Product Acumen
- 8+ years driving strategic productivity initiatives, ideally in SaaS/Cloud platforms or developer tools with some proven experience in AI initiatives.
- Considered an expert in building distributed systems and/or the infrastructure and tools to support it.
- Leadership & Collaboration
- Proven ability to lead cross-functional teams and influence senior stakeholders without direct authority.
- Strong communicator who can translate complex technical strategies into impact-oriented outcomes.
- Execution Focus
- Demonstrated track record delivering products or features that generated measurable business value.
- Comfortable defining success criteria, metrics, and ROI for ambiguous, future-facing domains.
- AI/ML & Automation
- Hands-on experience with AI or adjacent AI/ML platform experience with LLM integration and workflow automation, with demonstrated appetite to build toward agentic patterns
- Deep understanding of responsible AI practices and governance.
- Customer & Business Mindset
- Passion for solving real customer problems with elegant, scalable solutions.
- Ability to tie technical efforts directly to business KPIs (adoption, retention, revenue impact).

What Gives You an Edge:

- Experience working in cloud-native platforms or developer ecosystems.
- Prior leadership in scaling internal AI platforms or driving AI adoption across large organizations.
- Background in real-time data, event-driven architecture, or platform engineering.

If you’re someone looking to bring agentic system design to production scale, let’s talk.

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](http://ibm.com/careers/us-en/privacy-policy/).

## About Confluent

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Confluent provides a cloud-native data streaming platform built by the original co-creators of Apache Kafka, enabling organizations to stream, process, and react to data in real time.
- **Entity Type**: Public (NASDAQ: CFLT)
- **Headquarters**: Mountain View, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2014
- **Founders**: Jay Kreps, Jun Rao, Neha Narkhede

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Data streaming infrastructure, real-time data platforms
- **Target customers**: B2B, enterprise, developers, and data engineers
- **Mission/purpose**: To create the foundational platform for data-in-motion, unleashing the power of continuously flowing data so companies can innovate and win in the modern digital world.

## Products & Services
- **Confluent Cloud**: Fully managed, cloud-native data streaming service powered by the Kora engine. Offers autoscaling, 99.99% uptime SLA, transparent consumption-based pricing, and support for GBps+ workloads.
- **Confluent Platform**: Self-managed distribution of Apache Kafka with enterprise features, including Confluent for Kubernetes and Ansible playbooks for easier on-prem or hybrid deployment.
- **Schema Registry**: Supports Avro, Protobuf, and JSON Schema for stream governance.
- **120+ Pre-built Connectors**: Integrates with databases, data warehouses, SaaS apps, and cloud services.
- **Cluster Linking**: Enables real-time topic mirroring, data replication, and workload migration across clusters without downtime.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available from provided sources (public company; SEC filings available)
- **Key Metric**: Not publicly available from provided sources (public company; annual revenue disclosed in 10-K filings)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not disclosed in provided sources (public company with institutional investors; partners include major cloud providers)
- **Growth Signals**: 3,263 total employees (Built In), remote-first hiring across 25+ countries, hyper-growth mode, expanding engineering and sales teams globally.

## Competitive Advantages
- Founded by the original co-creators of Apache Kafka, ensuring deep platform expertise and compatibility.
- Complete, enterprise-grade platform with cloud-native architecture (Kora engine) that scales 10x faster than traditional Kafka and delivers 20-90%+ throughput savings.
- Fully compatible with Apache Kafka, allowing seamless migration and hybrid deployments.
- Strong security and compliance posture: SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS certifications.
- 99.99% uptime SLA for production workloads and transparent consumption-based pricing.

## Strategic Focus
- Enabling real-time AI and event-driven applications.
- Expanding global footprint with offices in Mountain View, London, Toronto, Bengaluru, Dubai, and Reston.
- Building a complete ecosystem of connectors and governance tools to simplify data streaming adoption.
- Scaling the platform to handle AI workloads and real-time microservices.

## Why Work Here
- **Remote-first culture**: Work where you thrive – home, office, or anywhere in between. Offices available in 9 locations globally.
- **Flexibility**: Flexible time off, volunteer time off, and support for all paths to parenthood.
- **Compensation**: Competitive equity program with no cliff, plus a one-time home office reimbursement of up to $500 USD.
- **Culture**: Values include “Prioritize Ruthlessly,” “One Team,” “Smart, Humble, and Empathetic,” “Lead with Courage and Honor,” and “Earn Our Customers’ Love.” Direct access to leadership via #ask-estaff Slack channel.
- **Growth**: Hyper-growth environment with opportunities to work on cutting-edge data streaming technology. Engineering roles span senior software engineers, staff engineers, and engineering managers.

## Sources
1. [careers.confluent.io](https://careers.confluent.io/)
2. [confluent.io](https://www.confluent.io/)
3. [confluent.io/about](https://www.confluent.io/about/)
4. [builtin.com/company/confluent](https://builtin.com/company/confluent)
5. [careers.confluent.io/life-at-confluent](https://careers.confluent.io/life-at-confluent)
6. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/confluent](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/confluent)

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