Set data in motion.
Principal Engineer – Engineering AI Productivity
Location
United States
Posted
27 days ago
Salary
$285K - $342K / year
Seniority
Lead
Job Description
Principal Engineer – Engineering AI Productivity
Confluent
• 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. • 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. • 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. • 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).
Job Requirements
- 8+ years driving strategic productivity initiatives, ideally in SaaS/Cloud platforms or developer tools with some proven experience in AI initiatives.
- Considered an expert in building distributed systems and/or the infrastructure and tools to support it.
- 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.
- Comfortable defining success criteria, metrics, and ROI for ambiguous, future-facing domains.
- Hands-on experience with AI or adjacent AI/ML platform experience with LLM integration and workflow automation, with demonstrated appetite to build toward agentic patterns.
- Deep understanding of responsible AI practices and governance.
- Passion for solving real customer problems with elegant, scalable solutions.
- Ability to tie technical efforts directly to business KPIs (adoption, retention, revenue impact).
Benefits
- Offers Equity
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