Senior Software Engineer - Confluent Kora

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:

Build and improve backend systems that power K2 Group Coordinator, with a focus on correctness, scalability, fault tolerance and performance.

Develop features and fixes in the K2 GC area, including group coordination workflows, service behavior, and integrations with underlying K2 components and dependencies.

Work on reliability and operational excellence for K2 GC by improving observability, dashboards, alerts, runbooks, and debugging workflows.

Participate in production readiness efforts such as rollouts, configuration changes, migration planning, and rollback safety for K2 GC. Diagnose and resolve issues related to latency, errors, saturation, concurrency bottlenecks, and dependency failures in distributed production systems.

Collaborate closely with adjacent teams across broker, storage, partition service, DevProd, and fleet/operator surfaces to ship and operate changes safely.

Contribute to engineering quality through strong design discussions, thoughtful implementation, testing, and clear operational handoff documentation.