Meet Steven, Our April 2023 Confluent Champion

Steven Zhang joined Confluent after graduating from Johns Hopkins University in 2019, seeking technically challenging work, and has since progressed to senior software engineer in the Stream Processing and Analytics organization. After spending three years developing ksqlDB features including SQL lambda syntax, metastore recovery, and faster provisioning, he moved to the Flink platform team to help build cloud infrastructure for Confluent’s managed Flink offering. His current work focuses on enabling upgrades with minimal or no query downtime, automatic rollback when upgrades fail, operational monitoring, autoscaling, and failure reporting to central fleet-management tools. Zhang describes Confluent as a remote-first, globally distributed workplace where teams coordinate across time zones through flexible scheduling, asynchronous code reviews, meeting-free periods, and virtual social activities. He values the company’s technical culture, cross-team collaboration, broad exposure to technologies, and annual team meetups, while suggesting that more cross-organizational events could strengthen belonging among remote employees.

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