Senior Business Systems Engineer, Metronome - Confluent

Introduction

At IBM Finance & Operations, we serve as the foundation of IBM’s transformation—driving efficiency, transparency, and better decision-making across the enterprise. Our teams deliver the insight and rigor that shape strategy, support financial strength, and help IBM fund innovation and growth. In Finance & Operations, you’ll combine analytical expertise with teamwork and curiosity. You’ll collaborate with colleagues across business functions, geographies, and disciplines, leveraging data, technology, and process excellence to build solutions that enhance performance and produce measurable results. IBM provides ongoing learning, career growth, and a culture that respects diverse viewpoints. Join our global organization and help propel IBM forward—while developing your own future in a fast-moving, evolving environment.

Your Role And Responsibilities

Confluent’s Business Systems team is seeking a Senior Business Systems Engineer to help engineer the systems that support a modern, consumption-based SaaS business. In this position, you will act as a senior technical owner for the Metronome platform, responsible for configuring, designing, developing, testing, deploying, and debugging high-complexity improvements and enhancements.

You will operate at the intersection of business process, software engineering, data, and enterprise architecture. You will partner closely with Finance, Sales, Deal Desk, Revenue Operations, Product, Engineering, Data, and other Business Systems teams to convert complex business requirements into secure, scalable, and maintainable solutions.

This is a hands-on role for an engineer who can transition confidently between requirements and architecture and implementation, automated testing, production deployment, and root-cause analysis. You will also help define technical standards, strengthen platform reliability, and establish reusable patterns that improve effectiveness across the broader Business Systems organization.

What You Will Do

• Own the end-to-end delivery of high-complexity Metronome initiatives, from discovery and solution design through development, testing, deployment, and post-release stabilization.

• Configure and extend Metronome to support changing usage, pricing, rating, billing, entitlement, invoicing, and downstream financial processes.
• Convert unclear business requirements into well-defined technical designs, implementation plans, delivery milestones, and measurable outcomes.
• Build scalable, resilient integrations between Metronome and neighboring systems including CRM, CPQ, ERP, data platforms, contract systems, and internal services.
• Develop platform customizations, scripts, services, APIs, and automation following strong software engineering practices, including version control, code review, logging, error handling, and documentation.

• Define and execute unit, integration, regression, performance, and user acceptance testing for complex system changes; partner with QA and business stakeholders to confirm end-to-end outcomes.

• Roll out changes using disciplined release and change-management practices, balancing speed, reliability, security, auditability, and operational readiness.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex production problems by tracing behavior across configurations, integrations, data flows, and dependent systems; determine root causes and implement durable fixes.

• Create reusable architecture patterns, development standards, runbooks, and observability practices that improve maintainability, release quality, and team velocity.
• Recognize downstream impacts, technical debt, and operational risks; propose practical tradeoffs and contingency plans before problems escalate.
• Facilitate cross-functional working sessions, communicate technical decisions to both technical and non-technical audiences, and build alignment when goals or solution approaches aren’t immediately obvious.

• Mentor other Business Systems engineers and help build a culture centered on thoughtful design, knowledge sharing, continuous improvement, and high-quality delivery.

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

Required Professional and Technical Expertise

architecture, or a related field; equivalent practical experience is welcome.

• 8+ years of experience in business systems engineering, software engineering, systems development, technical
• Hands-on experience designing, configuring, developing, testing, and deploying complex SaaS business-system solutions.
• Experience with Metronome or another usage-based billing, consumption management, metering, subscription billing, or revenue operations platform.
• Strong understanding of API-first integration patterns, Python REST APIs, webhooks, JSON, data models, SQL, scripting, and event-driven or asynchronous system behavior.
• Proven ability to deliver solutions that are scalable, testable, observable, secure, and maintainable—not only optimized for the immediate request.
• Experience with modern software delivery practices, including Git-based development, code review, automated testing, CI/CD, release management, and production support.
• Strong debugging and analytical skills, with the ability to pinpoint issues across configurations, code, integrations, data, and platform behavior.
• Experience working within a controlled enterprise setting with access controls, audit trails, change management, data governance, and compliance considerations.
• A record of independently owning complex technical work, balancing competing priorities, anticipating risks, and delivering against commitments with minimal supervision.

• Strong communication and facilitation skills, including the ability to clearly explain technical tradeoffs and build trust with business stakeholders, engineers, vendors, and senior leaders.

• A collaborative, customer-focused mindset and a preference for simplifying processes, eliminating manual effort, and improving the experience of the teams that rely on Business Systems.

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

Deep hands-on experience implementing or operating Metronome in a high-growth SaaS environment.

• Experience integrating usage and billing platforms with Salesforce, CPQ, NetSuite or another ERP, contract lifecycle management systems, data warehouses, or revenue-recognition workflows.

• Experience with consumption-based pricing, product catalog design, usage data quality, entitlements, invoicing, credits, collections, or revenue operations.
• Experience designing resilient data pipelines and integrations supporting high-volume usage events and financially significant business operations.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms, infrastructure-as-code, observability tooling, and secure service-to-service integration.
• Experience improving engineering standards, reusable frameworks, deployment automation, or developer productivity across multiple teams.
• Experience in a public-company or similarly stringent environment where reliability, auditability, and operational controls are critical.
• A thoughtful approach to AI-assisted development and automation, including sound judgment about where AI can accelerate delivery and where human review, testing, and controls are essential.