Senior Software Developer - Confluent Flink

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The Stream Processing & Analytics (SPA) team is building an elastic, reliable, durable, cost-effective, and performant stream processing engine based on Apache Flink for Confluent Cloud. Within SPA, the Flink Autopilot team owns the systems that make Flink a true cloud-native, "zero-knob" experience — autoscaling, resource management, and worry-free operations that deliver the right amount of stream processing at any given moment, so customers can focus on their use case instead of managing infrastructure.

As a senior engineer on Autopilot, you'll independently drive complex engineering projects end to end within our domain, become a go-to expert for one or more areas of the system, and help the team raise the quality and operational health of the platform.

What You Will Do

• Drive complex projects end to end: Independently take projects from design through production within the Autopilot domain — for example, autoscaling logic, resource management, or job/task manager resilience. Break large efforts into clear milestones and deliver them with high quality
• Master a domain: Develop deep expertise in one or more areas of Autopilot and become the person the team relies on for that area, representing your components in cross-functional design and architecture discussions
• Write scalable, performant systems: Design and build highly scalable, fault-tolerant systems, and articulate your thinking through clear design documents, one-pagers, and proposals
• Operational excellence and on-call: Improve the stability, performance, and automation of the systems you own. Participate in the on-call rotation, drive and mitigate incidents, and proactively address recurring operational toil
• Raise the bar through reviews and mentorship: Review PRs and designs with constructive feedback, coach junior engineers and interns, and contribute to the team's interview question pool and hiring
• Communicate clearly: Demonstrate strong, succinct written and verbal communication to align a small group on technical direction and keep stakeholders informed

* Deep Expertise involving 6 - 8+ years of relevant experience in stream processing or large-scale distributed systems and some familiarity with autoscaling, resource management, or scheduling in distributed data systems

* Strong fundamentals in distributed systems or stream processing, with a track record of independently designing, building, and shipping complex systems end to end

* Proficiency in Java and/or Scala (the core languages of the Flink engine), with the ability to contribute production code from day one

* Hands-on experience building and operating mission-critical systems in a public cloud environment (AWS, GCP, or Azure)

 * Ability to own a technical area, make sound trade-offs, and align a small group on direction.

* Experience with Kubernetes and operating distributed applications in production

* Open Source Engagement: Recognized, impactful technical contributions to open-source stream processing projects, particularly Apache Flink.

* Experience working with Go in a cloud control-plane context