We re not just building better tech We re rewriting how data moves and what the world can do with it With Confluent data doesn t sit still Our platform puts information in motion streaming in near real-time so companies can react faster build smarter and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them It takes a certain kind of person to join this team Those who ask hard questions give honest feedback and show up for each other No egos no solo acts Just smart curious humans pushing toward something bigger together One Confluent One Team One Data Streaming Platform About the Role Confluent Cloud processes millions of events per second across AWS GCP and Azure When incidents happen in a multi-cloud streaming platform they happen at scale data in motion exactly-once semantics and cascading failure modes that require deep systems thinking We need an expert-level engineer who can drive proactive reliability improvements that prevent these incidents before they occur This role combines hands-on technical work with strategic program ownership You ll spend roughly 75 of your time on engineering building automation improving tooling analyzing systemic failure patterns and designing reliability improvements The remaining 25 is teaching and coordination coaching teams through post-mortems training incident commanders and evolving our incident response practices You ll be part of a global team with follow-the-sun coverage with clean handoffs that keep everyone working sustainable hours Confluent has 800-1000 engineers across highly autonomous teams This role sits within Cloud Architecture and Reliability - Supportability CAR-S a horizontal team that owns reliability standards and tooling across engineering You re the person who makes us need incident management less What You Will Do Proactive Reliability Engineering 75 of role Analyze systemic failure patterns and design improvements that prevent incident recurrence Define and maintain SLO SLA frameworks use error budgets to guide reliability investments Build tooling and automation to reduce incident response toil and scale team impact Own Rootly configuration workflows and integrations with PagerDuty Jira Confluence and Slack Analyze reliability data to identify systemic improvements build dashboards that drive action Explore AI-assisted approaches to documentation quality and incident analysis Design scalable reliability standards that reduce reactive workload over time Incident Management Program 25 of role Own standards practices and continuous improvement of incident response Define incident commander eligibility criteria and manage the rotation Available as escalation IC when incidents exceed a team s management chain Develop and deliver training programs for engineering teams at all levels Coach teams through post-mortems and on developing actionable corrective actions Customer Root Cause Analysis CRCA Edit and review customer-facing incident documents to ensure quality and clarity Drive turnaround SLAs while maintaining technical accuracy Ensure clear explanation of what happened why and how we ll prevent recurrence Cross-Team Leadership Partner with engineering leaders to elevate reliability practices Be the expert who teams proactively engage for guidance What You Will Bring 10 years in SRE incident management or reliability engineering Cloud experience with at least one of AWS GCP or Azure Deep expertise with incident management tooling Rootly PagerDuty or similar platforms Strong understanding of distributed systems and failure modes at scale Kafka event streaming expertise preferred or demonstrated rapid mastery of complex systems Deep experience with observability metrics logging tracing ability to diagnose complex issues Kubernetes and container orchestration experience Understanding of CI CD pipelines and release processes Systems thinking understanding how infrastructure design choices affect failure modes and recovery Familiarity with SLO SLA frameworks Track record as a trusted advisor across engineering organizations Experience driving org-wide process and cultural changes Strong written communication design docs one-pagers runbooks Post-mortem facilitation experience Experience with async collaboration across time zones Large company experience navigating reliability incident programs at 500 engineer organizations What Gives You an Edge Multi-cloud experience minimum 2 of AWS GCP Azure Modern CI CD GitHub AI-assisted workflows you ll have the freedom to build what you need Ready to build what s next Let s get in motion 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 prospect 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