Senior Engineering Manager, Flink Control Plane
About The Position
The Flink Platform team is at the forefront of building a robust, serverless control plane for Confluent’s fully managed Flink offering. As the Senior Engineering Manager, you will lead a high-impact team of approximately 10 engineers—including two Staff-level individual contributors—responsible for the "brain" of our streaming service. You will own the customer-facing Flink REST API and Gateway, the Kubernetes operators that orchestrate Flink job lifecycles (submission, scaling, recovery), and the declarative API server that backs them – the stack every Flink customer interaction flows through. Your team is responsible for multi-tenant isolation, end-to-end reliability, and the integration points between Confluent's global control plane and the regional Flink data plane. This is a critical leadership role where you will balance deep technical strategy–driving architectural excellence and reliability–with a strong focus on people leadership, specifically growing a talented group of senior engineers into the next generation of Staff-level leaders.
Requirements
- 10+ years in software development with at least 5+ years in engineering management, specifically leading teams focused on cloud-native infrastructure or managed services.
- Deep knowledge of distributed systems orchestration (Kubernetes operators, controller patterns, declarative API servers) and multi-tenant resource isolation. Experience scaling control planes for managed cloud services (AWS, GCP, Azure, Elastic, Snowflake, Databricks, etc.) is highly preferred. Direct Flink experience is not required.
- A proven track record of hiring while ensuring a high bar, keeping engineers motivated through complex technical transitions, and managing performance effectively.
- A mindset geared toward "Operational Excellence." You understand how to build and maintain resilient, enduring technical foundations that serve as a central component for other teams to build upon.
- Exceptional ability to influence peers and upper management using data-driven, collaborative techniques and clear written/verbal communication.
Nice To Haves
- Direct Flink experience is not required.
Responsibilities
- Own the overall roadmap and execution for the Flink Control Plane. Define the strategy for job orchestration (submission, scaling, recovery) and serverless resource management.
- Lead the ongoing migration of the control plane onto Confluent's latest platform foundations and drive major component refactors in service of reliability, security, and scale. You will "see around corners" – making the right bets on architecture today so the platform stays resilient as Flink usage grows by orders of magnitude.
- Work with engineering teams and product management on critical aspects of product definition, architectural design, and delivery. Influence the overall domain health and operational hygiene for the platform.
- Drive the control plane's evolution to support 10x growth in compute pools, statements, and tenants per region. Lead initiatives that eliminate hotspots in the metadata and orchestration layers so customer-facing operations remain fast and predictable under load.
- Manage and coach a diverse team. Your primary mission is to mentor junior and mid-level developers, providing them with the architectural context and leadership skills to reach Staff levels.
- Work closely with engineering leadership and key stakeholders across Confluent Cloud to drive cross-team efforts to solve complex distributed system challenges at scale – strong cross-org partnership is core to the role.
- Lead the team in maintaining high code quality, comprehensive test coverage, and a robust on-call rotation, ensuring the control plane meets enterprise-grade reliability standards.
Benefits
- 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.
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
