Confluent - Staff Product Manager, Streaming Analytics Engine

Introduction

At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You’ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM’s product and technology landscape. Here, you’ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world.

Your role and responsibilities

About the Role:

Today, enterprises stitch together separate systems for streaming, analytics, and serving. Each of these systems come with its own latency, cost, and operational overhead. The next evolution of Confluent's platform collapses that complexity by continuously materializing streaming data into fast, queryable state that serves real-time analytics, operational applications, and downstream intelligent systems from a single foundation.

As a Staff Product Manager, you'll own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the core streaming analytics engine underlying Confluent's real-time data platform. This system sits at the intersection of stream processing, real-time analytical databases, and modern serving infrastructure, continuously transforming data in motion into low-latency, queryable materialized views that power AI agents, dashboards, operational queries, and event-driven applications. You'll own the engine: the storage, materialization, query layer, and performance, while partnering with peer product managers who own the downstream product experiences built on top of it.

This is a foundational, high-leverage role. You'll define a new product category that brings together concepts from streaming analytics, real-time OLAP, materialized views, and modern database systems into a cloud-native, streaming-first architecture. You'll partner directly with engineering, design, and senior leadership to bring this to market and position Confluent as a compelling alternative to standalone real-time analytical databases.

What You Will Do:

• Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience.

• Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative.

• Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics.

• Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale.

• Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it.

• Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning.

• Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud.

• Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area.

• Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership.

Required technical and professional expertise

What You Will Bring:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.

• 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles.

• 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch.

• Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering.

• Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space.

• Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization.

• Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership.

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems.

• Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user.

• Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure.

• Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery.

• Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models.

• Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects.

IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.