--- title: 'Staff Software Engineer I - SRE at Confluent' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-i-sre-confluent-in-vw7hbaxx1165' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-07' --- # Staff Software Engineer I - SRE at Confluent - **Company:** Confluent - **Location:** IN, India - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-02-16 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-07 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/confluent/0b2a4106-7f01-4205-813d-81e4fa1abdb4 ## 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: Confluent Cloud processes millions of events per second across AWS, GCP, and Azure. When incidents happen in a multi-cloud streaming platform, they happen at scale—data in motion, exactly-once semantics, and cascading failure modes that require deep systems thinking. We need an expert-level engineer who can drive proactive reliability improvements that prevent these incidents before they occur. This role combines hands-on technical work with strategic program ownership. You'll spend roughly 75% of your time on engineering: building automation, improving tooling, analyzing systemic failure patterns, and designing reliability improvements. The remaining 25% is teaching and coordination: coaching teams through post-mortems, training incident commanders, and evolving our incident response practices. You'll be part of a global team with follow-the-sun coverage, with clean handoffs that keep everyone working sustainable hours. Confluent has 800-1000 engineers across highly autonomous teams. This role sits within Cloud Architecture and Reliability - Supportability (CAR-S), a horizontal team that owns reliability standards and tooling across engineering. You're the person who makes us need incident management less. What You Will Do: - Proactive Reliability Engineering (~75% of role) · Analyze systemic failure patterns and design improvements that prevent incident recurrence · Define and maintain SLO/SLA frameworks; use error budgets to guide reliability investments · Build tooling and automation to reduce incident response toil and scale team impact · Own Rootly configuration, workflows, and integrations with PagerDuty, Jira, Confluence, and Slack · Analyze reliability data to identify systemic improvements; build dashboards that drive action · Explore AI-assisted approaches to documentation quality and incident analysis · Design scalable reliability standards that reduce reactive workload over time. - Incident Management Program (~25% of role) · Own standards, practices, and continuous improvement of incident response · Serve as an on-call Incident Commander for production incidents, including acting as escalation IC when incidents exceed a team's management chain · Develop and deliver training programs for engineering teams at all levels · Coach teams through post-mortems and on developing actionable corrective actions - Customer Root Cause Analysis (CRCA) · Edit and review customer-facing incident documents to ensure quality and clarity · Drive turnaround SLAs while maintaining technical accuracy · Ensure clear explanation of what happened, why, and how we'll prevent recurrence - Cross-Team Leadership · Partner with engineering leaders to elevate reliability practices · Be the expert who teams proactively engage for guidance What You Will Bring: - 10+ years in SRE, incident management, or reliability engineering · Cloud experience with at least one of AWS, GCP, or Azure· - Deep expertise with incident management tooling (Rootly, PagerDuty, or similar platforms) - Strong understanding of distributed systems and failure modes at scale—Kafka/event streaming expertise preferred, or demonstrated rapid mastery of complex systems - Deep experience with observability: metrics, logging, tracing—ability to diagnose complex issues · Kubernetes and container orchestration experience · Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and release processes · Systems thinking: understanding how infrastructure design choices affect failure modes and recovery · Familiarity with SLO/SLA frameworks. - Track record as a trusted advisor across engineering organizations · Experience driving org-wide process and cultural changes · Strong written communication (design docs, one-pagers, runbooks) · Post-mortem facilitation experience · Experience with async collaboration across time zones - Large company experience navigating reliability/incident programs at 500+ engineer organizations· What Gives You an Edge: - Multi-cloud experience (minimum 2+ of AWS/GCP/Azure). - Modern CI/CD, GitHub, AI-assisted workflows—you'll have the freedom to build what you need 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) ## Other roles at Confluent - [Staff Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-confluent-mountain-view-k421yhdctx4f) — Mountain View, CA - [Distributed Systems Software Engineer - WarpStream](https://feeny.ai/job/distributed-systems-software-engineer-warpstream-confluent-united-states-tyn33qrw50j6) — United States - [Senior Software Engineer - Streaming AI (Remote - Ontario / British Columbia)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-streaming-ai-remote-ontario-british-columbia-confluent-zrt6n9x08hqc) — Ontario, Canada - [Senior Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-confluent-job-posting-only-usa1-5gfb51y59dwg) — *job Posting Only: Usa1 - [Staff Software Engineer I](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-i-confluent-job-posting-only-usa1-mhj2fkk2ws07) — *job Posting Only: Usa1 - [Senior Software Engineer - Infrastructure](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-infrastructure-confluent-ca-cfadkb2xff0y) — CA, Canada - [Staff Product Manager, Cloud Networking](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-product-manager-cloud-networking-confluent-united-states-46g1y8cxx6aj) — United States - [Principal Engineer, Engineering AI Productivity](https://feeny.ai/job/principal-engineer-engineering-ai-productivity-confluent-united-states-3ms5wqdk5cz0) — United States - [Senior Software Engineer II, Kora Compute](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-ii-kora-compute-confluent-ca-7v8p5cma6j2p) — CA, Canada - [Senior Software Engineer II](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-ii-confluent-boston-kkstdncynhq0) — Boston, MA