Principal Engineer, Engineering AI Productivity

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Define and evangelize the AI and agentic flows strategy, aligning business metrics, engineering needs, and platform opportunities
• ▹Build a roadmap for agentic automation features, smart assistants, and AI-driven workflows across engineering
• ▹Identify and resolve bottlenecks across the entire product and software development lifecycle
• ▹Partner with Engineering, Trust, and Security to integrate AI capabilities responsibly and at scale
• ▹Drive complex cross-team projects requiring multi-stakeholder alignment
• ▹Continuously raise the bar for code and architectural quality across engineering
• ▹Lead delivery of core agentic workflows that improve productivity (roughly 60% execution, 40% strategy)
• ▹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 and write internal playbooks for scaling agentic outcomes

Requirements

• ▹8+ years driving strategic productivity initiatives, ideally in SaaS/cloud platforms or developer tools, with proven experience in AI initiatives
• ▹Considered an expert in building distributed systems and/or the infrastructure and tools to support them
• ▹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
• ▹Hands-on experience with AI/ML platforms, LLM integration, and workflow automation, with appetite to build toward agentic patterns
• ▹Deep understanding of responsible AI practices and governance
• ▹Passion for solving customer problems, tying technical efforts to business KPIs (adoption, retention, revenue impact)

Nice to have

• ▹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

Soft skills

About the company

Confluent is a data streaming platform company (founded by the creators of Kafka), an IBM subsidiary, that puts data in motion for enterprises in near real time.