Cloud Infrastructure Engineer Intern 2022

Confluent is pioneering a fundamentally new category of data infrastructure focused on data in motion. Have you ever found a new favourite series on Netflix, picked up groceries curbside at Walmart, or paid for something using Square? That’s the power of data in motion in action—giving organisations instant access to the massive amounts of data that is constantly flowing throughout their business.

At Confluent, we’re building the foundational platform for this new paradigm of data infrastructure. Our cloud-native offering is designed to be the intelligent connective tissue enabling real-time data, from multiple sources, to constantly stream across the organisation. With Confluent, organisations can create a central nervous system to innovate and win in a digital-first world.

About the role

We’re looking for self-motivated team members who crave a challenge and feel energised to roll up their sleeves and help realise Confluent’s enormous potential. Chart your own path and take healthy risks as we solve big problems together. We value having diverse teams and want you to grow as we grow—whether you’re just starting out in your career or managing a large team, you’ll be amazed at the magnitude of your impact.

Confluent is one of the 1,000 largest companies globally (by market cap) and is the pioneer of the Data in Motion movement.

Founded by thecreators of Apache Kafka out of LinkedIn in Silicon Valley, data in motion is becoming a foundational part of modern companies. Confluent’s cloud-native platform is designed to unleash real-time data. It acts as a central nervous system in companies, letting them connect all their applications around real-time streams and react and respond intelligently to everything that happens in their business.

Your role will contribute to the entire application lifecycle of our control-plane software (Golang), which orchestrates 10,000s of VMs in our multi-cloud (AWS, GCP & Azure)Kubernetes platform. We run 100,000s of containers, so you’ll become familiar with enhancing the existing tech stack, including monitoring.

Apache Kafka technology powers over 80% of the world's largest companies. You’ll be working on our hosted offering (Confluent Cloud), which powers many big-name businesses such as: Ao.com, Bosch, CapitalOne, Citigroup, Deutsche Bahn, Domino’s, eBay, Expedia, Intel, Nationwide, Priceline, Ticketmaster, Urban Outfitters

Your impact

During this internship you will:

• Research and proactivity - interns and full-time employees alike are expected to define our technical roadmap through their knowledge and -research of the problem domain.
• Design - we use a lightweight “one-pager” architecture process to propose changes, solicit feedback and collaborate across teams for change control.
• Implementation-this is where you’re likely to spend most of your time.
• Golang code - typically Kubernetes operators - to manage container-based cloud infrastructure
• Infrastructure - ownership of cloud infrastructure through IaC methodologies (e.g. Terraform)
• Persistence layer (databases & streams) - managing Postgres or Kafka persistence systems
• UX - creating management and developer tooling for use by colleagues outside of your team
• Security - our customers trust us with their data, and we must maintain security best practices throughout our platform
• Testing - we pride ourselves on a well-tested codebase with high levels of code coverage and end-to-end testing (CI/CD pipelines)
• Continuous improvement - Keeping up-to-date with recent technological and software developments
• Proudness - You build it, and you run it! With our support, we expect you to be proud, enthusiastic, responsible and accountable for your deliverables, maintenance and setting solid foundations for future evolution.

Who you are

• Creativity & imagination: Software is part science and part art - creative “outside the box” thinking can take you a long way.
• Patience & attention to detail: Thinking through a solution and paying attention to the details to ensure that successful last 20% of a project will set you up for success
• Curiosity and proactivity: Dissecting how systems work to understand their behaviour and going as far as possible in discovering different learning areas.
• Humility & empathy: Nobody wants to work with a “brilliant jerk” persona. We value these human qualities to provide a better working environment for all.
• Distributed systems: Having a broad understanding of distributed systems can make the difference in hitting the ground running and being effective in our organisation.
• Team spirit: We’re looking for team players - people able to help, support, and work in a team as a “great” team.
• Knowledge of software/programming languages: Most successful candidates will already have good knowledge of at least two programming languages (Golang is a plus).
• Good communication and presentation skills: Our platform evolves at pace - effective communication is critical in our highly technical environment.
• Analytical skills: Much like debugging software, often, our research and development work relies on spotting patterns. An analytical persona will be compelling with us.
• Enthusiasm / “GSD” attitude: You must be enthusiastic and have a “can-do” attitude. You won’t have all the answers - we expect you to balance self-learning alongside asking your colleagues and mentors to get the job done.

Bonus points

Do you know what this means? Make sure to mention this in your cover letter!

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Come as you are

At Confluent, equality is a core tenet of our culture. We are committed to building an inclusive global team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, beliefs, and experiences. The more diverse we are, the richer our community and the broader our impact.