Confluent Champion: Engineering a Better Developer Experience a Test at a Time

Based in Bangalore, India, Akshatha has been working as a Senior Software Engineer on the Developer Productivity team at Confluent for the past two years. Her focus is on building TestBreak, Confluent’s internal build and test analytics dashboard, where she works on improving build and test health, identifying flaky tests, and looking into ways to help improve the developer experience. Learn how she’s tapped into her passion for problem-solving and continuous learning while making life easier for her fellow Confluent developers.

Tell us a bit about your role here. How has joining Confluent helped you grow or change?

Since joining Confluent’s Developer Productivity team, I’ve grown a lot on the technical front—building automation and systems that make the developer experience smoother. I’ve learned to design with scalability, maintainability, and long-term impact in mind. A big part of my journey has been working on continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, creating tools to improve build and test health, and leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to make test triaging faster and more reliable.

At the same time, I’ve realized that technical impact goes hand in hand with collaboration. Clear communication, alignment across teams, and proactively sharing context—especially in a remote-first company—have been just as important. Finding that balance between technical depth and cross-team collaboration has been one of my biggest areas of growth here.

What motivates you to excel, learn new technical skills, and grow in your role?

What drives me is the chance to keep pushing myself—whether that’s learning something new, looking at a problem from a different perspective, or taking on challenges bigger than what I’ve done before. I enjoy the process of figuring things out and seeing that effort turn into real impact for the team.

Since joining, I’ve picked up a lot of new skills in developer productivity. Learning how to work with CI/CD pipelines at scale, improve build systems, and build automation has allowed me to make it easier for developers at Confluent to build what our customers need. One of the most exciting parts of my work has been contributing to our internal build and test dashboard, where I’ve built features that help developers in triaging failures.

Working on these projects has really pushed me to think more deeply about scalability, maintainability, and long-term reliability. Confluent makes that possible by encouraging creativity and creating an environment where experimenting and trying new ideas is appreciated.

Looking ahead, I’m especially excited to explore how we can bring in AI and its features to automate more of the developer workflow and unlock new levels of productivity.

What's unique about Confluent's company culture? What’s one question you would tell people to ask about the culture during their interviews?

For me, it’s the emphasis on continuous learning and the freedom to try new things that make working here unique. I’ve come to realize culture fit matters just as much as technical ability. In a remote-first company, it makes a big difference to know how teams stay collaborative and support each other’s growth.

At Confluent, there’s space to be creative and take ownership while knowing you have a supportive team to back you up. People genuinely invest in each other’s learning through mentorship, knowledge sharing, and encouragement. And alongside that, there’s a healthy respect for work-life balance, which makes it easier to bring your best self to work every day. In my experience, that’s the kind of culture that promotes open, constructive discussions and makes it easy to see how you’re part of something bigger.

How do you see yourself growing at Confluent over the next few years?

In the next few years, I see myself taking on bigger challenges—whether that’s leading projects end to end or helping shape how our developer productivity tools evolve.

I want to keep growing technically, especially in building systems at scale and using AI to improve the developer experience. At the same time, I’d love to mentor others and contribute more to the culture that’s helped me grow here.

Rapid-fire questions:

1. What job did you want to have when you were a child?  

   1. Teacher

2. What’s the best decision you made in your career?  

   1. Joining Confluent :)

3. What’s your favorite TV show set in an office? 

   1. The Office

4. What’s your work-from-home must-have?  

   1. A big coffee mug

5. If you could have your team off-site anywhere in the world, where would it be? 

   1. Somewhere near a beach

6. What’s your favorite way to unwind after work/on the weekends? 

   1. Listening to music, reading novels, taking short trips to someplace nearby