Principal Engineer - Confluent

Introduction

At IBM Software, we turn client challenges into practical solutions. We build the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that help shape the future of business and society. Our culture of innovation opens up meaningful opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make a real impact at a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team driven by curiosity and collaboration. You’ll work with a wide range of technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that enable digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the center of IBM’s product and technology ecosystem—giving you the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world.

Your Role And Responsibilities

About the job

We’re not only improving technology—we’re redefining how data moves and what people and organizations can do with it. With Confluent, data doesn’t remain static. Our platform keeps information moving, streaming in near real time so companies can respond sooner, build smarter, and deliver experiences as fast-moving and dynamic as the world around them.

This team requires a specific kind of teammate: someone who asks tough questions, provides candid feedback, and shows up for others. There’s no room for ego or solo heroics—just thoughtful, curious people working together toward something bigger.

One Confluent. One Team. One Data Streaming Platform.

About The Role

We are building the Kafka Connect charter, which is fundamental for scalable and dependable streaming data exchange between Apache Kafka® and other data systems. It makes it straightforward to define connectors that move large data sets into and out of Kafka quickly. Kafka Connect can ingest entire databases or gather metrics from application servers into Kafka topics, enabling low-latency stream processing. An export connector can send data from Kafka topics into secondary indexes such as Elasticsearch, or into batch systems like Hadoop for offline analysis.

We are seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the technical vision, architecture, execution, and operations for core engineering teams that build Confluent’s industry-leading Kafka Connectors.. As an individual contributor leader for this product line, you will guide the world-class Connect team in driving innovation and staying ahead of competitors.

What You Will Do

• Collaborate with a strong group of engineers to help evolve Confluent Connect. Partner closely with product management, engineering leadership, and other key stakeholders across various Confluent teams to build and drive the overall roadmap.
• Shape the long-term direction and strategy for Confluent Kafka connectors, partnering with internal stakeholders to move the team’s mission forward
• Lead the technical charter for Connect, and create competitive differentiation for Kafka connectors through innovation. Drive enhancements to Kafka connectors to make them more usable and powerful for customers, and simpler to adopt and scale.
• Mentor a team of high-performing engineers and leads, supporting continued skill growth through hands-on experience and mentorship. Deliver timely, high-quality feedback, reinforce a growth mindset, and help team members define and work toward personal development goals.
• Establish a culture of continuous improvement and prioritize major, high-impact initiatives that will fundamentally transform Kafka connectors.
• Serve as a strong technical leader and engineering representative for India. Promote a culture of excellence by focusing on hiring, communication, execution, and work quality. Create and manage processes that help the team do its best work.
• Maintain a strong growth trajectory by hiring top-tier engineers, and define quality standards, design principles, and operational maturity for the team
  
  

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• Minimum of 15+ years of hands-on software development experience with the ability to anticipate future technical needs for the product and craft plans to realize them.
• Taking ideas to production is something we look for. Ready to roll up your sleeves - code, debug, design - do whatever it takes to ship the product to production.
• Experience building and operating large-scale systems. Experience running production services in public clouds.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development.
• A self starter with the ability to work effectively in teams. Proactively identifying the symptoms of technical issues and reason about their causes is needed. This will be followed by fixing the root causes.
• Timely shipping of deliverables; being able to trade-off short term technical decisions with the long term. Move fast, build in increments, and iterate. A sense of urgency, a mindset towards achieving results, and excellent prioritization skills.
• Ability to influence the team, peers and upper management in technology decisions using effective communication and collaborative techniques
• Strong mentorship track record, guiding the team in building out complex systems, and helping them in their professional development.
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent experience. Understanding of various technologies, programming paradigms and frameworks is needed. Ability to be pragmatic and trade off their usage in production is essential.
• Ability to take on intense customer production issues on-call; debugging and mitigating them will be needed. This requires patient log and metrics analysis with solid reasoning to nail the issue.