confluent - Staff Product Manager, Real Time Data Analytics Platform

• Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience. • Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative. • Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics. • Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale. • Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it. • Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning. • Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud. • Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area. • Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership. • Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. • 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles. • 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch. • Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering. • Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space. • Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization. • Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership. • WHAT GIVES YOU AN EDGE: • Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems. • Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user. • Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure. • Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery. • Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models. • Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects. • 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.