Sr. Manager, KORA Orchestration Global

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. This is a role leading our Kora Global team, the group behind Confluent’s multi‑region replication stack for Confluent Cloud. That includes technologies like Cluster Linking and Multi‑Region Clusters, which are the backbone for customers who need disaster recovery, global data sharing, and aggregation across regions, clouds, and continents. You would own the vision and multi‑year roadmap for Kora Global, deciding how we evolve our replication capabilities, improve reliability and performance, and support new DR and global footprint use cases. You’d lead and grow a team of distributed systems engineers, responsible not just for building features but also for operating a large fleet of mission‑critical clusters across AWS, GCP, and Azure. Operational excellence is a huge part of the job: you'll be accountable for meeting and exceeding SLAs for some of our most critical services, driving root cause analyses, and implementing long‑term fixes that improve security, reliability, and performance. You’d also work closely with product management and other engineering leaders across Kafka/Kora, networking, and control plane to deliver cross‑team initiatives - everything from improved DR experiences to new multi‑region capabilities for our largest customers. What success looks like in 6–12 months: - A clear multi‑year strategy and technical roadmap for Kora Global is defined, socialized, and actively being executed. - The team has delivered at least one major cross‑team initiative that measurably improves reliability, performance, scalability, or multi‑tenancy of multi‑region replication. - SLA metrics for Kora Global services (availability, RPO/RTO, latency) are stable or improving for mission‑critical cloud services. - The team is fully staffed and high‑performing, with clear expectations, strong coaching, and a high bar on talent and performance. - Demonstrated operational excellence: strong on‑call practices, high‑quality RCAs, and visible reduction in repeat incidents and toil. Ideal Candidate Profile: - Experience with large-scale distributed systems, especially Kafka or similar streaming platforms. - Strong background in cloud infrastructure, automation, and orchestration. - Proficiency in designing, migrating, and operating control plane APIs and services. - Familiarity with security best practices (RBAC, mTLS, S2S). - Track record of driving reliability, operational excellence, and incident response in production environments. - Ability to collaborate across engineering, product, and operations teams. Why It Matters (Business Impact): - Kora Orchestration is central to ensuring Confluent Cloud’s Kafka platform is reliable, scalable, and secure for enterprise customers. - The team’s work directly impacts customer experience, operational efficiency, and the ability to deliver new features at scale. - By modernizing orchestration and control plane components, the team reduces operational toil, accelerates incident recovery, and supports strategic business continuity and security initiatives. 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. PRIVACY STATEMENT Confluent is an IBM subsidiary which has been acquired by IBM and will be integrated into the IBM organization. By proceeding with this application, you understand that Confluent will share your personal information with other IBM affiliates involved in your recruitment process, wherever these are located. More Information on how IBM protects your personal information, including the safeguards in case of cross-border data transfer, are available here http://ibm.com/careers/us-en/privacy-policy/.