Job Title

Staff Software Engineer - Kora Orchestration Join to apply for the Staff Software Engineer - Kora Orchestration role at Confluent Were not just building better tech. Were rewriting how data moves and what the world can do with it. With Confluent, data doesnt sit still. Our platform puts information in motion, streaming in near realtime 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 Our team is responsible for managing the metadata that makes Kafka a reliable, faulttolerant, and highperformance distributed streaming platform. This includes coordinating the election of leaders, monitoring broker availability, persisting and distributing metadata, coordinating clusterwide actions, and more. In this role, you will be working on building a highly available, reliable, secure, scalable, and multitenant metadata layer. You will be instrumental in driving the technical solutions endtoend, working closely with the team and key stakeholders to design, architect, and develop topnotch solutions. The team recently completed a major initiative to implement its own consensus protocol based on the Raft protocol. This new protocol, named Kraft, has allowed the team to remove the dependency on Zookeeper, which allows for more scalable and robust metadata management as well as a more simple deployment model for Kafka. Examples of some of the challenges we've taken on in recent years: Kora: A CloudNative Event Streaming Platform For Kafka KRaft: Apache Kafka Without ZooKeeper Why ZooKeeper Was Replaced with KRaft The Log of All Logs KIP866: ZooKeeper to KRaft Migration KIP853: KRaft Controller Membership Changes What You Will Do Drive the endtoend delivery of complex, multiquarter technical projects and critical infrastructure components from concept to production, setting a high bar for operational excellence, scalability, reliability, and security. Act as a primary technical escalation point for complex, elusive production issues and architectural challenges. Proactively identify systemic weaknesses and drive largescale refactoring or architectural changes to prevent future recurrence. Exert influence across multiple teams and organizational boundaries (e.g., product, support, engineering) to align technical direction, mitigate crosscutting risks, and ensure cohesive, highquality solution delivery. Serve as a technical voice of the customer, anticipating future needs and translating ambiguous, highlevel business problems into clear, executable technical strategies and architectures that drive significant customer value and product adoption. Act as a force multiplier by actively mentoring and coaching engineers and elevating the overall technical acumen and best practices across the organization. What You Will Bring BS, MS, or PhD in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience. 8+ years of progressive experience in designing, building, and operating largescale, missioncritical distributed systems (or equivalent expertise). Deep, expertlevel understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including consensus protocols (e.g., Raft/Paxos), consistency models (e.g., strong, eventual), faulttolerance, and highavailability architecture. Experience building and operating largescale systems in the Cloud. Solid understanding of basic systems operations (disk, network, operating systems, etc.). Demonstrated history of mentoring engineers and driving significant improvement in engineering practices and operational rigor across multiple teams. Proficiency in Java, Scala, C/C++, Go or other statically typed languages. What Gives You An Edge Expertlevel proficiency in Java and the JVM ecosystem, including threading, performance tuning, and diagnostics. Handson experience with consensus algorithms (Raft, Paxos, etc.), or experience operating largescale coordination services (ZooKeeper, etcd, Consul). A strong background in distributed storage systems or databases. Experience/knowledge with public clouds (AWS, Azure or GCP). Interest in evangelism (giving talks at tech conferences, writing blog posts evangelizing Kafka). Ready to build whats next? Lets get in motion. Come As You Are Belonging isnt a perk here. Its 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 whats possible. Were proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. Employment decisions are based on jobrelated criteria, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other classification protected by law. Seniority level MidSenior level Employment type Fulltime Job function Engineering and Information Technology Industries Software Development #J-18808-Ljbffr