Job Description

Description

With Confluent, organisations can harness the full power of continuously flowing data to innovate and win in the modern digital world. We have a purpose that drives us to do better everyday – we're creating an entirely new category within data infrastructure - data streaming. This technology will allow every organisation to create experiences and use the power of data in ways that profoundly impact the way we all live. This impact is our purpose and drives us to do better every day.

One Confluent. One team. One Data Streaming Platform.

Data Connects Us.

About the Role:

There has been renewed interest in CP with push for more deals and renewals. This implies complete rehaul of our observability solution for CP - which is the Confluent Control Center. Control Center is the management and monitoring platform for CP. It used to monitor Kafka cluster deployments at scale. At the moment we support about 120K partitions for monitoring. Control Center is the best observability solution for CP - the competition yet to catch up on the scale Control Center can handle.

Control center is being given a fresh look. With hybrid strategy on cards for CP - Control center will play a key role in the transition of user experience from CP to Cloud. An elaborate plan to improve the user experience of the Control Center is being worked on. 

You will be the lead frontend engineer for this whole stream which is being bootstrapped. This is a multi-year strategy which you will drive from its inception. Control Center is an existing product used widely by our customers. This brings the challenge of moving towards a new direction taking the existing deployments along. The migration and evolution path needs to be clearly charted out and executed. You need the ability to handle open-ended strategy in this area - explore and experiment new ideas that benefit customers - not driven by a list of requirements to deliver.  Code yourself and build complex parts of the system’s user experience. Handle customer on-calls - debug issues and suggest mitigations. You will have the opportunity to work across the breadth and depth of technology in CP.

Being in such engineering teams requires you to handle not only the operational and engineering excellence but also aid in development of the user experience roadmap; evolve vision and direction for the team. Collaborate with the rest of the organization to make progress on the roadmap and make the vision a reality. 

What You Will Do:

• You will build new UI features based on user requirements and iterate to ensure the desired user experience for customers.
• You will build a UI that scales. Control center is used to manage huge deployments - the sheer number of cluster components or metadata will be high. This is coupled with enterprise grade security - authentication and authorization. Ensuring the responsiveness of the UI with such volume of data is something to think about. With so much data it's clear that advanced search is mandatory ensuring the users find what they need quickly and accurately.
• You will build reusable UI components that work as standard across all the pages - ensures quicker turnaround time with consistent UI experience.
  With a stream platform like CP - it's essential that the UI show real time data. We use Websockets for bidirectional real time communication. The message browser for Kafka, query interface to ksqlDB are some of examples that use this mode. You will need to build such interfaces as necessary.
• Being an observability platform - the state of UI should reflect the cluster activity happening in the backend and raise alerts so the users can take action. Such is the dynamic UI you will work with and enhance.
• You will work with the product and UX team to understand the experience - map them to the API contracts that exist or new ones needed. 
• Work with backend software engineers to understand the API contract and ensure the user experience is not degraded due to performance constraints from the backend APIs.
• Work with designers to understand and build components styling, from interactions to specification.
• Create and manage processes/tools that enable the team to do its best work.

What You Will Bring:

• Minimum of 7+ years of hands-on software development UI experience with the ability to anticipate future technical needs for the product and craft plans to realize them. Taking ideas to production is something we look for.
• Proficiency in Frontend tech stack: React/TypeScript/Flow.js, Redux, React Query, Webpack, Jest, HTML5, CSS3, Playwright, Graph QL. Knowledge of Figma, Zeplin tools.
• Experience with CI/CD tools. We need you to be automation oriented in every aspect of software engineering. No manual UI testing. This also means building UI in a way that it can be verified using automation.
• Experience building interfaces for large-scale systems.  Strong foundation in algorithms and application design..
• You will deal with the existing Control Center codebase - ability to handle existing codebase that has evolved over the years is needed. You will refactor the code to suit the new business needs.
• A self starter with the ability to work effectively in teams. Proactively identifying the symptoms of technical issues and reason about their causes is needed. This will be followed by fixing the root causes.
• Timely shipping of deliverables; being able to trade-off short term technical decisions with the long term.Move fast, build in increments, and iterate. A sense of urgency, a mindset towards achieving results, and excellent prioritization skills.
• Ability to influence the team, peers and upper management in technology decisions using effective communication and collaborative techniques
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent experience. Understanding of various technologies, programming paradigms and frameworks is needed.
• Ability to be pragmatic and trade off their usage in production is essential. 
• Strong foundation in algorithms and application design
• Ability to take on intense customer productions issues on-call; debugging and mitigating them will be needed. This requires patient log and metrics analysis with solid reasoning to nail the issue.