[Remote] Principal Engineer, Engineering AI Productivity

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Confluent is focused on transforming how data moves and is utilized, and they are seeking a strategic and hands-on technical leader to enhance their internal AI capabilities. The Principal Engineer will define the AI and agentic flows strategy, partner across teams to scale AI usage, and lead the delivery of workflows to improve engineering productivity.

Responsibilities

• 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)
• 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

Skills

• 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)
• Experience working in cloud-native platforms or developer ecosystems
• Prior leadership in scaling internal AI platforms or driving AI adoption across large organizations
• Background in real-time data, event-driven architecture, or platform engineering

Company Overview

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