Confluent - Principal Engineer - AI Productivity

About the Role:

We’re seeking a strategic and hands-on technical leader to define and drive Confluent’s internal agentic AI capabilities, and adoption of smart, automated decisioning systems for R&D productivity. In this role, you will partner across Engineering, Security, and IT to scale AI usage across our platform to accelerate value for customers and the business.

You will operationalize a vision where AI augments developers, automates routine tasks, and orchestrates intelligent workflows that unlock new usage patterns.

What You Will Do:

• Strategy & Vision

• Define and evangelize the AI and agentic flows strategy — aligning business metrics, engineering needs, and platform opportunities.

• Build a roadmap for introducing agentic automation features, smart assistants, and AI-driven workflows across all aspects of engineering.

• Identify and resolve bottlenecks across the entire product and software development life cycle.

• Cross-Functional Leadership

• Partner with Engineering, Trust and Security to integrate AI capabilities responsibly and at scale.

• Operationalize AI adoption internally and share use cases externally

• Drive complex cross-team projects requiring multi-stakeholder alignment

• Continuously raise the bar for code/architectural quality across engineering

• Execution & Delivery

• Lead the delivery of core agentic workflows that improves productivity across engineering

• Balance of hands-on contributions with effective delegation to others. Expect 60% execution and 40% strategy setting.

• Drive measurable adoption of AI tooling and flows with internal teams

• Governance & Best Practices

• Ability to 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).

• Thought Leadership

• Participate in external forums — conferences, podcasts, customer briefings on occasion

• Evolve as the technology landscape shifts

• Write internal playbooks for building and scaling agentic outcomes.

If you’re someone looking to bring agentic system design to production scale, let’s talk.