Confluent Champion: Building a Secure Foundation for Accelerating Product Launches

As a software engineer, Akshay Ben is always seeking new skills and ways to challenge himself. In the last 3+ years on Confluent’s Product Security team, he has helped build core security features across Confluent’s platform and played a part in accelerating product launches.

Find out why he joined the Engineering team at Confluent and what keeps him motivated and ready to keep learning and growing.

Why did you join Confluent, and what keeps you here? What types of interesting challenges are you solving?

I joined Confluent because I was eager to learn and fresh from graduating with a degree in a field that was different from my real interest, which was software engineering. It was my version of FOMO and a drive to prove I belonged. I wanted to dive into technical problems, ask for ownership, and surround myself with driven folks. And Confluent exceeded the bar.

Currently, I’m working on solving how our Identity and Access Management (IAM) organization operates to accelerate product development. We shifted from providing customer IAM features for one product at a time to enabling multiple products to launch at once.

I'm just one member working on a subset of this transformation goal but part of a broader organization. Ultimately, we’re working toward bringing product development at Confluent to the next phase of its evolution—with an integrated platform that provides essential building blocks to accelerate feature delivery.

What excites you about Confluent’s technology? What does the power of “data in motion” unlock?

When I joined Confluent as part of the Authorization team, we had just launched role-based access control (RBAC) for Confluent Cloud, and we were moving onto adding parity to our two other leading products: ksqlDB and Schema Registry.

Everyone on the team was working on a single mission for a specific product. The work was exciting with a lot of ownership and challenges, but it was inefficient. We couldn't scale in this operational model.

What now excites me about Confluent is not one specific technology but the reality that there are multitudes of offerings, which together we call the data streaming platform, getting added every quarter. At every all-hands meeting, teams are excited to showcase their new product launches. Every month, teams are reaching out to Product Security to integrate.

Especially in a fast-paced, remote-first environment where everyone is always on the move, belonging can mean different things to different people. What has it looked like at Confluent for you?

Confluent has a set of company values that drive our culture. My favorite one is our “Get Stuff Done” mentality. Everyone I've met here is smart and driven to find solutions for hard problems. They don’t shy away from addressing conflict and accept differences in ideas. When you’re surrounded by teammates who are driven, it also drives you to excel and gives you a sense of belonging.

What skills or technologies have you gained since joining? What are you looking forward to learning next?

From my first set of mentors—thanks to Tejal, Milo, Cyrus, and Jeff from the broader Product Security and Access Management Foundations team I’m part of—I’ve been challenged on my preconceived engineering “ideals” and questioned to think deeper on problems.

There is a litany of technical skills I’ve accrued working here, but if I had to impart some engineering skills that I’m still honing:

• There are a lot of things you can do, but you need to know what you should do.

• Fail fast, fail faster.

• Ask for forgiveness, not permission.

• And most of all, be nice!

As for what I'm looking forward to, I'm jumping on the bandwagon after my recent explorations with agentic AI. The hype is justified, and I'm sold. Invest in learning.

Rapid-fire questions:

1. Slack or email: Slack

2. Most-used Slack emoji: :ack:

3. Early 🐣 or Night 🦉: Night 🦉

4. Your fave perk that comes with WFH? No need to commute through the arctic blast.

5. One song that instantly boosts your mood: Unfortunately, I suck at songs. Spotify playlists just run in the background. 

6. Dream job as a kid: Some kinda doctor.

7. Favorite thing to do after logging off: Browse the web.

8. Your favorite Confluent memory: All the escape rooms during off-sites.

9. What’s the best decision you made in your career? Prioritize learning non-technical skills.