Principal Engineer, Engineering AI Productivity

Confluent

4d • $285,000 - $342,000

About The Position

We’re seeking a strategic and hands-on technical leader to define and drive Confluent’s internal agentic AI capabilities, and adoption of smart, automated decisioning systems for R&D productivity. In this role, you will partner across Engineering, Security, and IT to scale AI usage across our platform to accelerate value for customers and the business. You will operationalize a vision where AI augments developers, automates routine tasks, and orchestrates intelligent workflows that unlock new usage patterns.

Requirements

• 8+ years driving strategic productivity initiatives, ideally in SaaS/Cloud platforms or developer tools with some proven experience in AI initiatives.
• Considered an expert in building distributed systems and/or the infrastructure and tools to support it.
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional teams and influence senior stakeholders without direct authority.
• Strong communicator who can translate complex technical strategies into impact-oriented outcomes.
• Demonstrated track record delivering products or features that generated measurable business value.
• Comfortable defining success criteria, metrics, and ROI for ambiguous, future-facing domains.
• Hands-on experience with AI or adjacent AI/ML platform experience with LLM integration and workflow automation, with demonstrated appetite to build toward agentic patterns
• Deep understanding of responsible AI practices and governance.
• Passion for solving real customer problems with elegant, scalable solutions.
• Ability to tie technical efforts directly to business KPIs (adoption, retention, revenue impact).

Nice To Haves

• Experience working in cloud-native platforms or developer ecosystems.
• Prior leadership in scaling internal AI platforms or driving AI adoption across large organizations.
• Background in real-time data, event-driven architecture, or platform engineering.

Responsibilities

• Define and evangelize the AI and agentic flows strategy — aligning business metrics, engineering needs, and platform opportunities.
• Build a roadmap for introducing agentic automation features, smart assistants, and AI-driven workflows across all aspects of engineering.
• Identify and resolve bottlenecks across the entire product and software development life cycle.
• Partner with Engineering, Trust and Security to integrate AI capabilities responsibly and at scale.
• Operationalize AI adoption internally and share use cases externally
• Drive complex cross-team projects requiring multi-stakeholder alignment
• Continuously raise the bar for code/architectural quality across engineering
• Lead the delivery of core agentic workflows that improves productivity across engineering
• Balance of hands-on contributions with effective delegation to others. Expect 60% execution and 40% strategy setting.
• Drive measurable adoption of AI tooling and flows with internal teams
• Adopt industry standards, ethical frameworks, guardrails, and quality metrics for AI behavior and automated flows.
• Define success metrics and KPIs (e.g., AI-driven usage lift, automation ROI, reduction in manual workflows).
• Participate in external forums — conferences, podcasts, customer briefings on occasion
• Evolve as the technology landscape shifts
• Write internal playbooks for building and scaling agentic outcomes.

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed