Engineering Manager Tiffany Jianto on Career Growth and Taking Ownership at Confluent

Tiffany Jianto, an engineering manager for Confluent’s Kafka Serverless team, oversees work to automate Apache Kafka cluster management through capabilities such as Self-Balancing Clusters and elastic scaling, while balancing project planning, customer issues, operations, and the career development of seven direct reports. After switching from mathematics to computer science and spending six years helping build AWS RDS Aurora before moving into management, she chose Confluent over Google for its growth, startup-like environment, leadership opportunities, and potential for broader impact. Jianto emphasizes trust, regular one-on-ones, quarterly career discussions, clear progression frameworks, and experimentation to help employees develop, while her team tackles the complex challenge of automatically detecting overloaded brokers and hot partitions without disrupting clusters under heavy demand. She also helped launch Confluent’s Women in Engineering group to create mentorship and career-growth connections, particularly amid remote work, and supports engineering’s active role in defining the company’s evolving serverless product strategy. Her advice to women entering STEM is to embrace challenging opportunities, ask questions, resist self-doubt, and recognize the value that diverse perspectives bring to technical teams.

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