Your role and responsibilities
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
- 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
Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
- 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
- Kafka/event streaming expertise preferred, or demonstrated rapid mastery of complex systems
Preferred technical and professional experience
• Advanced Cloud Knowledge: Experience with cloud-based infrastructure and its application in reliability and resiliency engineering. • Specialized Scripting Skills: Proficiency in scripting languages and automation tools to optimize system reliability and performance.
OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILSMust have the ability to work in Canada without sponsorship.
This role will involve working with technology that is covered by Export Regulations sanctions. If you are a Foreign National from any of the following US sanctioned countries (Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and the Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia regions of Ukraine) on a work permit, you are not eligible for employment in this position.
The salary range for the position is based on a full-time schedule. Your ultimate salary within this range may vary depending on your job-related skills and experience for this position.
