Confluent - Staff Systems Engineer

We're looking for a Staff Systems Engineer to be the technical leader for Cloud, Network & Automation within Corporate IT. You will set the architecture and engineering standards for the cloud environments, network access, secrets, infrastructure-as-code pipelines, and automation platforms that every employee and every IT team depends on. This is a broader and more senior scope than a Senior Systems Engineer: rather than owning individual systems end to end, you define how those systems are designed, delivered, secured, and handed off, and you raise the bar for the engineers around you. You will partner closely with the Identity and SaaS pillars, Trust & Security, and Infrastructure, and you will help guide the integration of our environments with IBM. You influence roadmap and risk decisions without relying on formal authority.

What You Will Do

• Cloud Platform Architecture: Set technical direction for our AWS, GCP, and Azure footprint supporting corporate IT, including account, project, and subscription structure, guardrails, networking, and cost and risk hygiene. Lead the cleanup and hardening of legacy cloud environments and define the target state.
• Infrastructure as Code & GitOps: Own the reference patterns and delivery pipelines for infrastructure change (Terraform, Atlantis, Argo, Semaphore), including module standards, pull-request controls, drift detection, and safe rollout practices that other engineers can adopt without your help.
• Network & Zero Trust Access: Architect secure remote access and network connectivity across standard and FedRAMP environments, including VPN and zero trust access tooling (for example Palo Alto Networks platforms), resource routing, allowlisting, and egress IP management.
• Automation & Orchestration Platforms: Own the platforms IT automation runs on (Rundeck, Semaphore CI, Workato, Cloud Run and Cloud Functions). Set standards for how automation is built, tested, secured, monitored, and handed off, and eliminate systemic toil with durable software rather than one-off scripts.
• Secrets, Service Accounts & Workload Identity: Define patterns for secrets management (Vault), service accounts, tokens, and workload identity federation across clouds and CI/CD. Partner with the Identity pillar, which owns user identity and access governance, so that machine identity is consistent, least-privilege, and auditable.
• Core Services & Cloud-Native Operations: Own or guide operational patterns for DNS (DNSControl and the it-dns repository), load balancers and TLS lifecycle, GKE/Kubernetes, Cloud SQL and other service databases, and logging and monitoring, with clear service ownership and runbooks.
• Developer & Virtual Desktop Infrastructure: Set administration and security standards for the GitHub Enterprise organization and the VDI environment, balancing developer experience, security, lifecycle governance, and auditability.
• Security Posture, Incident & Compliance: Drive cloud and infrastructure security posture, including SSPM findings, misconfiguration remediation, and suspicious-activity investigations with Trust & Security. Design technical controls and supply audit evidence for FedRAMP, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and related frameworks.
• Technical Strategy & Integration Leadership: Lead ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives from problem definition through architecture, rollout, and operational handoff, including integration and consolidation work with IBM. Make and document build-versus-buy and sequencing decisions, and communicate tradeoffs to engineers, auditors, and executives.
• Mentorship & Operational Excellence: Mentor engineers across the team, including colleagues in other time zones, review designs and changes, and set expectations for on-call, incident response, documentation, and handoff so critical systems never depend on tribal knowledge.

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.

We're proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. Employment decisions are based on job-related criteria, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other classification protected by law.