Staff Technologist. Office of the CTO [Remote - USA/UK]

Confluent, Mountain View, California

Real-Time Data at Massive Scale

Duration: Full-Time

Confluent is pioneering a fundamentally new category of data infrastructure focused on data in motion. Have you ever found a new favorite series on Netflix, picked up groceries curbside at Walmart, or paid for something using Square? That’s the power of data in motion in action—giving organizations instant access to the massive amounts of data that is constantly flowing throughout their business. At Confluent, we’re building the foundational platform for this new paradigm of data infrastructure. Our cloud-native offering is designed to be the intelligent connective tissue enabling real-time data, from multiple sources, to constantly stream across the organization. With Confluent, organizations can create a central nervous system to innovate and win in a digital-first world.

We’re looking for self-motivated team members who crave a challenge and feel energized to roll up their sleeves and help realize Confluent’s enormous potential. Chart your own path and take healthy risks as we solve big problems together. We value having diverse teams and want you to grow as we grow—whether you’re just starting out in your career or managing a large team, you’ll be amazed at the magnitude of your impact.

About the role:

As a Technologist at Confluent you’ll perform a technical, yet cross-disciplinary role, sitting in Confluent’s Office of the CTO. The role involves four key parts, weighed most heavily on the first:

External Thought Leadership: Shape the industry thinking around Event Streaming, with a particular focus on Developers, Architects, CTOs. Drive adoption of Apache Kafka and Confluent products.

Product Direction and Prototyping: Recommend notable changes in technology direction to Product/Engineering. Prototype early-stage ideas, explore practicalities of different software approaches and formalize new strategies for implementing them.

Competition and Technology Trends: Track technology trends affecting Confluent’s trajectory, analyze competitive threats from a technology perspective, and look for opportunities.

Credibility: Establish credibility for Confluent by engaging with critical C-level customers, industry analysts, etc.

What sort of person are you?

You’re likely working as a senior engineer or architect, applying your understanding of software, people, organizations and products to solve the big problems faced in software delivery. Your career has at least some focus on data engineering and event streaming. You may well have written a book, be a keen blogger, or occasional conference speaker, motivated by your desire to get your ideas out into the world. Alternatively, you may have taken a different path to a similar place: for example, coming from a product management role or having worked as a developer advocate.

What you’ll do day-to-day?

Analyze a new concept or methodology (e.g., what a data mesh is), prepare a write up, convert that into a Kafka Summit talk and a blog post on the subject. Recommend to the product organization how this trend might benefit our products, should it take off. Later prototype a self-service data mesh application that could be used in a company. Showcase this on developer.confluent.io.
Work with the Integration Architecture team on a serverless stream processing prototype. Build the prototype and test it under load. Improve the underlying serverless connector where appropriate. Help the Developer Advocate team shape a conference talk around serverless stream processing. Prepare and potentially record an explainer video.
Track and analyze competitive threats and prepare a monthly report to the company. Prepare a deep-dive analysis for one particular threat and present it to senior management.
Design and author a page for developer.confluent.io on event modeling providing practical advice on the contents of an event, practices for evolving event schemas, topic topologies, and handling identity, deletion, and other compounding factors. Research the work through the community and Confluent’s Professional Services team.
Collaborate with the engineering team on a blog series we want them to publish on distributed systems principles in the wild. Your role is to steer the content engineering creates, review, and if you wish, contribute directly to the series.

The skills you’ll need to do well

Strategy/Analysis: Extract the important concepts and details from a complex technical domain, summarize and articulate clearly and succinctly. Know when to dig deep.
Influence: Deal confidently with Confluent’s C-level as well as C-level customers should the need arise. Influence outcomes outside of the team.
Content: Create novel content that reframes existing concepts in interesting ways.
Writing: Excellent written style. Can clearly explain complex concepts.
Speaking: Confident speaking style, spanning both technical and conceptual content.
Autonomy: Delivers high-quality tasks with minimal supervision. Manages expectations and deadlines.
Programming: Proven programmer.
Industry Experience: Experienced software engineer and well versed on software architecture. Can advise on the practice of both of these to an advanced level.Broad understanding of the technology space in general, distributed systems, and business. Event streaming experience is considered a huge plus.

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Come As You Are

At Confluent, equality is a core tenet of our culture. We are committed to building an inclusive global team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, beliefs, and experiences. The more diverse we are, the richer our community and the broader our impact. Employment decisions are made on the basis of 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 applicable law.

Confluent requires all employees (in office and remote) in the U.S. to be vaccinated for COVID-19. Consistent with federal, state, and local requirements, Confluent will consider requests for reasonable accommodation based on medical conditions/contraindications or sincerely-held religious beliefs where it is able to do so without undue hardship to the company.

Click here to review our California Candidate Privacy Notice, which describes how and when Confluent, Inc., and its group companies, collects, uses, and shares certain personal information of California job applicants and prospective employees.

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About Confluent

Our Story Founded by the team that built Apache Kafka®, Confluent builds a streaming platform that enables companies to easily access data as real-time streams Background Every byte of data has a story to tell, something of significance that will inform the next thing to be done. In a data-driven enterprise, how we move our data becomes nearly as important as the data itself. With greater speed and agility, data’s value increases exponentially. From its very early days, we have open-sourced Apache Kafka™ and have led it to impressive industry-wide adoption across several thousand companies. Now we are focusing on building a streaming platform to help other companies get easy access to enterprise data as real-time streams.