Staff Site Reliability Engineer - Incident Management & Reliability
Confluent
Job Overview
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Job Description
Staff Site Reliability Engineer - Incident Management & Reliability at Confluent
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. This role sits within Cloud Architecture and Reliability - Supportability, 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
- Analyze systemic failure patterns and design reliability improvements that prevent incident recurrence
- Own Rootly configuration, workflows, and integrations with PagerDuty, Jira, Confluence, and Slack
- Define and maintain SLO/SLA frameworks; use error budgets to guide reliability investments
- Own standards, practices, and continuous improvement of incident response across engineering
- Edit and review customer-facing incident documents (CRCAs) to ensure quality and clarity
- Develop and deliver training programs; coach teams through post-mortems
- Partner with engineering leaders to elevate reliability practices org-wide
What You Will Bring
- 10+ years of relevant experience in SRE, incident management, or reliability engineering
- Cloud experience with at least one of AWS, GCP, or Azure (we run all three)
- Experience navigating reliability/incident programs at 500+ engineer organizations
- Deep expertise with incident management tooling (Rootly, PagerDuty, or similar)
- Strong understanding of distributed systems and failure modes at scale
- Deep experience with observability: metrics, logging, tracing
- Kubernetes and container orchestration experience
- Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and release processes
- Strong written communication (design docs, runbooks, post-mortems)
- Experience driving org-wide process and cultural changes
- Kafka/event streaming expertise preferred, or demonstrated rapid mastery of complex systems
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 opportunity 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.
Key skills/competency
- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
- Incident Management
- Reliability Engineering
- Distributed Systems
- Cloud Computing (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Kubernetes
- Observability (Metrics, Logging, Tracing)
- CI/CD Pipelines
- Kafka/Event Streaming
- Post-mortems
How to Get Hired at Confluent
- Research Confluent's culture: Study their mission, values, recent news, and employee testimonials on LinkedIn and Glassdoor.
- Tailor your resume for SRE roles: Highlight experience in distributed systems, incident management, and cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, or Azure.
- Showcase reliability engineering expertise: Emphasize proactive incident prevention, SLO/SLA frameworks, and post-mortem analysis.
- Prepare for technical interviews: Focus on system design, incident response scenarios, and deep dives into Kubernetes or Kafka.
- Demonstrate collaborative leadership: Be ready to discuss coaching teams, driving process changes, and cross-functional partnerships.
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