Principal Engineer – Engineering AI Productivity

Confluent

Strategic technical leader defining and driving AI capabilities for Confluent’s productivity. Collaborating across teams to integrate AI and smart automation solutions into the development lifecycle.

Posted 5/15/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $285,000 - $342,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

CloudDistributed SystemsSDLC

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

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).

Requirements

What you’ll need

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

Comp & perks

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Hard Skills & Tools

AIagentic automationsmart assistantsAI-driven workflowsdistributed systemsworkflow automationLLM integrationsuccess metricsKPI definitionethical frameworks

Soft Skills

strategic productivitycross-functional leadershipinfluence without authoritystrong communicationimpact-oriented outcomesproblem-solvingdelegationstakeholder alignmentexecutionadaptability