Manager II, Engineering – Secure Compute Platform

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 seek a hands-on engineering leader to lead a high-performing and dynamic team responsible for building, maintaining, and scaling the foundational secure compute layer of Confluent Cloud. The team is dedicated to empowering our customers and internal product teams by providing essential building blocks—including isolation, identity, and networking—that allow for the safe execution of untrusted code and data processing across AWS, Azure, and GCP. As Confluent grows its product portfolio, this secure infrastructure becomes increasingly vital in attracting and retaining our highly regulated, multi-tenant customer base, driving product adoption, and fueling overall company growth. Your leadership will be critical to delivering platform features and polyglot container-based runtime, ensuring world-class quality, security, and reliability across thousands of clusters globally. You will guide the team in solving some of the most challenging problems in distributed systems, effectively prioritizing tasks and architectural decisions to align with long-term company goals. In this role, you will define a multi-year roadmap that balances security with cost-efficiency. Your leadership will foster a collaborative environment, drive continuous innovation in cloud-native infrastructure, and maintain the high development and management standards necessary to support Confluent’s mission-critical workloads.

WHAT YOU WILL DO:

• Lead the strategic vision and multi-year roadmap for the Secure Compute Platform, aligning foundational infrastructure with company growth goals.

• Provide hands-on technical leadership in distributed systems, Kubernetes, and container-based runtimes to ensure world-class security and scale.

• Partner with Product, Security, and Cloud Infrastructure teams to define architectural standards and deliver seamless, end-to-end solutions.

• Cultivate a culture of technical excellence and ownership within a high-performing and inclusive engineering team. Lead, mentor, and scale a team of 6-8 engineers.

• Drive the exploration and adoption of AI-driven tools and workflows to accelerate team velocity and enhance operational efficiency.

• Own the execution of critical platform building blocks—including isolation, identity, and networking—to meet the needs of a global, multi-tenant customer base.

• Champion operational hygiene and observability, maintaining high standards for reliability and performance across thousands of global clusters.

• Influence overall domain health by driving platform adoption and ensuring secure compute interfaces meet the needs of developer-centric users.

WHAT YOU WILL BRING:

• 10+ years of experience in software development and 3+ years in management.

• Experience in building and designing resilient systems at scale using hyperscale CSPs (AWS, Azure, GCP), with a proven track record of “seeing around corners” to reduce complexity and create critical enduring technical foundations.

• Demonstrated expertise in building and scaling secure, high-performance distributed systems, with deep technical proficiency in Kubernetes, container internals, and lower-level systems.

• Understanding API governance frameworks and best practices for ensuring API consistency, security, and reliability.

• Ability to influence the team, peers, and upper management using effective communication and collaborative techniques.

• Ability to hire while ensuring a high hiring bar, motivate engineers, coach/mentor, and manage performance.

• An excellent track record of timely shipping features, a sense of urgency, an aggressive mindset toward achieving results, and excellent prioritization skills.

• Bachelor’s or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience

WHAT GIVES YOU AN EDGE:

• Proven track record in contributing to or maintaining foundational open-source projects within the cloud-native or distributed systems ecosystem (e.g., CNCF, Kubernetes).

• Demonstrated ability to build and foster a strong engineering community while driving the adoption of innovative platform technologies, such as AI-driven infrastructure automation.

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/.