Confluent - Engineering Manager, Connect

• Own execution for the Connect engineering team and deliver high quality connectors and platform improvements • Lead, coach and grow a team of 6 to 10 engineers while building a culture of ownership and continuous improvement • Work closely with product management and senior engineering leaders to contribute to roadmap planning and technical direction • Drive improvements in connector reliability, performance and operational excellence across cloud environments • Stay close to system design and architecture and step in hands on when needed to guide or unblock the team • Help evolve shared frameworks, tooling and development patterns so that building new connectors becomes faster and more consistent • Collaborate with SRE and support teams to improve observability, on call experience and overall operational health • Explore and introduce AI assisted engineering practices to improve developer productivity and workflows • Balance delivery of new features with investments in technical debt, scalability and long term maintainability • 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 3 years in an engineering management or tech leadership role • Strong foundation in distributed systems, data platforms or integration systems such as pipelines, messaging systems or connectors • Experience delivering and operating production systems, along with exposure to managing multiple parallel workstreams • Familiarity with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP or Azure and the broader data ecosystem • Ability to work effectively with cross functional teams and influence outcomes through collaboration • Experience hiring, mentoring and growing engineers at different levels • Strong execution skills with the ability to prioritize, make tradeoffs and deliver iteratively • Interest in improving engineering productivity, including the use of modern tooling such as AI assisted workflows • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent experience • What Gives You an Edge: • Experience with Apache Kafka or Confluent connectors • Experience building or operating connectors or data integration systems • Familiarity with Kubernetes or cloud native systems • Experience with Java or other JVM based technologies • Exposure to stream processing technologies such as Kafka Streams or Flink • Contributions to open source projects • Ready to build what's next? Let’s get in motion. • Come As You Are • 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.