Director of Engineering, Governance

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 are building a data governance platform that enables any customer to manage the structure, policy and discoverability of their real time data. The platform provides capabilities to create, manage and enforce schemas and policy on their data, as well as enable tagging, discoverability and sharing across their organization. Structured, governed and discoverable data is the lifeblood of our product, and the key to customers ability to extract value, insights and impact from the real time data that they run their businesses on. We are looking for an engineering leader to partner deeply with our Product team to build the vision, strategy and roadmap for the next generation of governance features and services, while maintaining mission critical level reliability and security of the current system. In this role you will be accountable for the design, development, quality and operations for technologies that run on clients and clouds, in both fully managed cloud and self managed on prem configurations, as well as open source Schema Registry. You will help shape and define the next generation of catalog services for data streaming that enable customers to seamlessly integrate Kafka, Flink and Iceberg in any Confluent Cloud, Confluent Platform, hybrid or Open Source deployment. WHAT YOU WILL DO: - Lead a highly productive, global team of software engineers and engineering leaders - Drive the long-term direction and strategy of Governance in Confluent, while partnering with internal stakeholders to drive the team’s mission forward. - Create competitive advantages for Confluent by driving technical innovation in governance and adjacent technologies. - Drive improvements in schema management, and enforcement including enabling a shift from thick to thin clients. - Continue a strong growth trajectory by hiring top tier engineers, and establish quality standards, design principles, and operational maturity for the team. WHAT YOU WILL BRING: - 10+ years of second-level engineering management experience leading productive, high-functioning teams. - Maintain a high hiring bar while recruiting, motivating engineers, coaching/mentoring, and managing performance. - Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development. - A great track record of shipping features and hitting deadlines consistently. - Sense of urgency, an aggressive mindset towards achieving results, and excellent prioritization skills. - Able to anticipate future technical needs for the product and craft plans to realize them, guided by our customers. - A sense of vision and strategy to see around corners and set our customers up for long term success through technical and product innovation over multiple years. - Preferred experience running production services in public clouds. - Ability to influence the team, peers, and upper management using effective communication and collaborative techniques. Focus on building and maintaining a culture of collaboration within the team. 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.