Senior Software Engineer II - KORA

Senior Software Engineer II - KORA 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: The Kora Group Coordinator team is responsible for the core coordination layer that ensures large fleets of consumers and transactional workloads within Kora remain balanced, fault-tolerant, and predictable. We are transitioning from broker-embedded coordination to a standalone, cloud-native service, prompting us to rethink how group membership, state, and metadata are stored, replicated, and recovered at scale. The challenges we address are at the intersection of distributed systems, storage, and cloud operations: designing replicated state machines, managing high-volume, low-latency traffic, handling failures and rebalances gracefully, and achieving all of this across multiple regions and tenants while meeting strict reliability and performance requirements. WHAT YOU WILL DO: As a Senior Software Engineer II, you’ll work on the core coordination layer of a modern cloud data platform: a highly available, low-latency service that keeps large fleets of distributed workloads balanced, fault-tolerant, and predictable. This means tackling real distributed systems challenges: scaling coordination and metadata services to thousands of nodes, hardening them against failures, and making them observable and easy to operate. You will directly contribute to enhanced reliability and performance for all Confluent customers through the improvements you deliver. - Design and implement high‑scale, low‑latency features in distributed coordination cloud-native services. - Own complex projects end to end: refine ambiguous requirements into clear milestones, drive execution across components and services, and deliver production‑ready changes with appropriate test coverage and observability. - Lead reliability and operational improvements for core services, including health checks, incident reduction, resilience testing, rollout and migration strategies, dashboards and alerts. - Raise the technical bar through thoughtful design documents, code reviews and technical mentorship of other engineers. - Collaborate cross‑functionally with product, platform, security, and other engineering teams to define requirements, evaluate trade‑offs and deliver designs that balance reliability, cost, and customer impact. - Contribute to operational excellence by improving runbooks, debugging workflows, tooling, and automation around service health, incidents and rollouts. WHAT YOU WILL BRING: - Design and implement high‑scale, low‑latency features in distributed coordination cloud-native services. - Own complex projects end to end: refine ambiguous requirements into clear milestones, drive execution across components and services, and deliver production‑ready changes with appropriate test coverage and observability. - Lead reliability and operational improvements for core services, including health checks, incident reduction, resilience testing, rollout and migration strategies, dashboards and alerts. - Raise the technical bar through thoughtful design documents, code reviews and technical mentorship of other engineers. - Collaborate cross‑functionally with product, platform, security, and other engineering teams to define requirements, evaluate trade‑offs and deliver designs that balance reliability, cost, and customer impact. - Contribute to operational excellence by improving runbooks, debugging workflow ... (truncated, view full listing at source)