Staff Site Reliability Engineer - Confluent Cloud Infrastructure

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.

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

• Serve as an on-call Incident Commander for production incidents, including acting 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

Bachelor's Degree

Master's Degree

Years of Experience:10 - 15