Staff Developer - Incident Command

Confluent Cloud processes millions of events per second across AWS, GCP, and Azure. When incidents happen in a multi-cloud streaming platform, they happen at scale—data in motion, exactly-once semantics, and cascading failure modes that require deep systems thinking. We need an expert-level engineer who can drive proactive reliability improvements that prevent these incidents before they occur.

This role combines hands-on technical work with strategic program ownership. You'll spend roughly 75% of your time on engineering: building automation, improving tooling, analyzing systemic failure patterns, and designing reliability improvements. The remaining 25% is teaching and coordination: coaching teams through post-mortems, training incident commanders, and evolving our incident response practices.

• You'll be part of a global team with follow-the-sun coverage, with clean handoffs that keep everyone working sustainable hours. This role sits within Cloud Architecture and Reliability
• Supportability, a horizontal team that owns reliability standards and tooling across engineering. You're the person who makes us need incident management less.

What You Will Do:

• Analyze systemic failure patterns and design reliability improvements that prevent incident recurrence
• Own Rootly configuration, workflows, and integrations with Pager Duty, Jira, Confluence, and Slack
• Define and maintain SLO/SLA frameworks; use error budgets to guide reliability investments
• Own standards, practices, and continuous improvement of incident response across engineering
• Edit and review customer-facing incident documents (CRCAs) to ensure quality and clarity
• Develop and deliver training programs; coach teams through post-mortems
• Partner with engineering leaders to elevate reliability practices org-wide
• Deep experience with observability: metrics, logging, tracing
• Kubernetes and container orchestration experience
• Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and release processes
• Strong written communication (design docs, runbooks, post-mortems)
• Experience driving org-wide process and cultural changes