Senior Software Engineer - Confluent

Introduction

At IBM Software, we turn customer challenges into real-world solutions. We build industry-leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that help shape the future of business and society. Our long-standing tradition of innovation provides IBMers with continuous opportunities to learn, grow, and make a meaningful impact on a global scale. Working in Software means collaborating with a team driven by curiosity and teamwork. You’ll partner with a wide range of technologies, customers, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that enable digital transformation. With a culture that champions innovation, career growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software puts you at the center of IBM’s product and technology ecosystem. You’ll gain the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that truly changes the world.

Your Role And Responsibilities

About the Role

Backend engineers at Confluent tackle a broad set of complex challenges—such as creating core cloud frameworks and services that power every component of the platform running in the cloud. The team is developing a multi-tenant, multi-cloud, cloud-native compute substrate to support seamless data integration across Confluent Cloud.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you approach delivery strategically and lead end-to-end technical execution, from customer experience through to scaling internal operations. You apply your expanding expertise in cloud-native, distributed systems to advance our execution platform. You also deeply care about key operational capabilities—availability, reliability, performance, monitoring, capacity planning, and disaster recovery—within the Connect Platform, helping ensure customers can depend on a highly available, resilient, and secure environment for their mission-critical data pipelines.

What You Will Do

• Build mission-critical infrastructure: Develop, test, and operationalize high-performance, scalable, and resilient backend services.
• Build and evolve Kafka connectors: Design, develop, and maintain Kafka Connect connectors to integrate with external data systems.
• Scale and optimize connector performance: Address complex stream processing challenges using cloud and on-premises resources to enhance performance, scalability, and elasticity of Kafka Connectors.
• Troubleshoot & debug: Investigate a complex technical stack that includes microservices, Kubernetes, containers, and virtualization to resolve issues and optimize performance.
• Support operational excellence: Join on-call rotations, ensure our services are operationally ready, and help the team meet availability and performance SLA commitments.
• Innovate & improve: Serve as a proactive engineer who identifies and recommends architectural, process, and operational enhancements.
  
  

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• 4+ years of industry experience designing, building, and supporting backend systems in production.
• Strong engineering fundamentals, including an emphasis on software quality, code reviews, documentation, and automated testing.
• Excellent programming and algorithmic skills, with proficiency in major programming languages such as Java, Go, C/C++, or Python.
• Cloud-native experience, including hands-on experience or strong familiarity with configuring and deploying distributed systems and microservices with modern tools (e.g., Kubernetes, Helm, Docker).
• Operational awareness, including experience participating in on-call rotations and a strong motivation to build reliable, production-grade cloud services.
• Self-starter mindset, with the ability to work effectively in a team and strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Collaborative approach, with customer-centric thinking, teamwork, and enthusiasm for learning and growing alongside peers.
• Educational background: BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
  
  

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Experience contributing to large-scale, highly available, low-latency, and high-throughput data systems.
• Knowledge of control planes, data planes, and multi-tenant resource management in public clouds (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Experience working with or extending the internal architecture of Apache Kafka® or Kafka Connect.