IB
Job Description
Introduction
At IBM Software, we turn client challenges into real solutions. By building the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products, we help shape the future of business and society. Our history of innovation opens up limitless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and create impact on a global scale. If you join Software, you’ll become part of a team driven by curiosity and collaboration—working with a wide range of technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that support digital transformation. With a culture that prioritizes innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the center of IBM’s product and technology environment. You’ll gain the tools and opportunities to advance your career while building software that makes a difference in the world.
Your Role And Responsibilities
About the job
We’re not only improving technology—we’re redefining how data moves and what the world can do with it. At Confluent, data keeps moving. The platform streams information in near real-time, enabling companies to respond faster, create smarter solutions, and deliver experiences that evolve just like the world around them.
This team needs people who ask tough questions, provide candid feedback, and show up for one another. There are no egos and no solo performances—just thoughtful, curious individuals 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 essential for scalable and reliable streaming data between Apache Kafka® and other data systems. It enables teams to quickly define connectors for moving large data sets into and out of Kafka. Kafka Connect can ingest entire databases or pull metrics from application servers into Kafka topics, making that data available for stream processing with low latency. An export connector can deliver 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 of core engineering teams building Confluent’s industry-leading Kafka Connectors. As an IC leader for this product line, you will guide the world-class Connect team in delivering innovation and staying ahead of competitors.
What You Will Do
Master's Degree
Required Technical And Professional Expertise
At IBM Software, we turn client challenges into real solutions. By building the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products, we help shape the future of business and society. Our history of innovation opens up limitless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and create impact on a global scale. If you join Software, you’ll become part of a team driven by curiosity and collaboration—working with a wide range of technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that support digital transformation. With a culture that prioritizes innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the center of IBM’s product and technology environment. You’ll gain the tools and opportunities to advance your career while building software that makes a difference in the world.
Your Role And Responsibilities
About the job
We’re not only improving technology—we’re redefining how data moves and what the world can do with it. At Confluent, data keeps moving. The platform streams information in near real-time, enabling companies to respond faster, create smarter solutions, and deliver experiences that evolve just like the world around them.
This team needs people who ask tough questions, provide candid feedback, and show up for one another. There are no egos and no solo performances—just thoughtful, curious individuals 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 essential for scalable and reliable streaming data between Apache Kafka® and other data systems. It enables teams to quickly define connectors for moving large data sets into and out of Kafka. Kafka Connect can ingest entire databases or pull metrics from application servers into Kafka topics, making that data available for stream processing with low latency. An export connector can deliver 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 of core engineering teams building Confluent’s industry-leading Kafka Connectors. As an IC leader for this product line, you will guide the world-class Connect team in delivering innovation and staying ahead of competitors.
What You Will Do
- Work with a strong team of engineers to evolve Confluent Connect. Partner closely with product management, engineering leadership, and other key stakeholders across Confluent teams to build and drive the overall roadmap.
- Set the long-term direction and strategy for Confluent Kafka connectors, while collaborating with internal stakeholders to advance the team’s mission
- Lead the technical charter for Connect, driving innovation to create competitive advantages for Kafka connectors. Improve Kafka connectors to make them more usable and powerful for customers, and easier to adopt and scale.
- Mentor a team of high-performing engineers and leads, supporting continuous growth through hands-on experience and mentorship. Provide timely and constructive feedback, reinforce a growth mindset, and help team members establish and work toward personal development goals.
- Establish a culture of continuous improvement and prioritize large, high-impact initiatives that will fundamentally change Kafka connectors.
- Serve as a strong technical leader and engineering representative for India-based teams. Build a culture of excellence by focusing on hiring, communication, execution, and work quality. Create and manage processes that enable the team to 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
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.
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