Staff Site Reliability Engineer - Confluent Cloud Infrastructure

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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 · 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

• 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

• 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·

• 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.

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