Staff Site Reliability Engineer - Confluent Cloud Infrastructure

Introduction

At IBM Software, we turn client challenges into real-world solutions. We build world-leading, AI-powered, cloud-native products that help shape the future of business and society. Our culture of innovation opens up countless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and create meaningful impact globally. Working in Software means joining a team driven by curiosity and collaboration. You’ll work across diverse 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 puts you at the center of IBM’s product and technology ecosystem—equipping you with the tools and opportunities to advance your career while building software that changes the world.

Your Role And Responsibilities

Confluent Cloud handles millions of events per second across AWS, GCP, and Azure. When incidents occur within a multi-cloud streaming platform, they occur at scale—moving data in real time, operating with exactly-once semantics, and featuring cascading failure modes that demand deep systems thinking. We are looking for an expert-level engineer who can lead proactive reliability improvements to prevent these incidents before they happen.

This position blends hands-on engineering with strategic program ownership. Approximately 75% of your time will be engineering-focused: building automation, enhancing tooling, studying systemic failure patterns, and designing reliability improvements. The remaining 25% is dedicated to teaching and coordination—coaching teams through post-mortems, training incident commanders, and refining our incident response practices.

You will join a global team operating on a follow-the-sun coverage model, supported by clean handoffs that help everyone maintain sustainable working hours. Confluent includes 800-1000 engineers distributed across highly autonomous teams. This role is based within Cloud Architecture and Reliability - Supportability (CAR-S), a horizontal group responsible for reliability standards and tooling across engineering. Your work ensures we rely on incident management less over time.

What You Will Do

Proactive Reliability Engineering (75% of role)

• Analyze systemic failure patterns and design improvements that prevent incident recurrence
• Define and maintain SLO/SLA frameworks; use error budgets to guide reliability investments
• Build tooling and automation to reduce incident response toil and scale team impact
• Own Rootly configuration, workflows, and integrations with PagerDuty, Jira, Confluence, and Slack
• Analyze reliability data to identify systemic improvements; build dashboards that drive action
• Explore AI-assisted approaches to documentation quality and incident analysis
• Design scalable reliability standards that reduce reactive workload over time.
  
  

Incident Management Program (25% of role)

• Own standards, practices, and continuous improvement of incident response
• Serve as an on-call Incident Commander for production incidents, including acting as escalation IC when incidents exceed a team's management chain
• Develop and deliver training programs for engineering teams at all levels
• Coach teams through post-mortems and on developing actionable corrective actions
  
  

Customer Root Cause Analysis (CRCA)

• Edit and review customer-facing incident documents to ensure quality and clarity
• Drive turnaround SLAs while maintaining technical accuracy
• Ensure clear explanation of what happened, why, and how we'll prevent recurrence
  
  

Cross-Team Leadership

• Partner with engineering leaders to elevate reliability practices
• Be the expert who teams proactively engage for guidance
  
  

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

10+ years in SRE, incident management, or reliability engineering

• Cloud experience with at least one of AWS, GCP, or Azure·
  
  

Deep expertise with incident management tooling (Rootly, PagerDuty, or similar platforms)

Strong understanding of distributed systems and failure modes at scale—Kafka/event streaming expertise preferred, or demonstrated rapid mastery of complex systems

Deep experience with observability: metrics, logging, tracing—ability to diagnose complex issues

• Kubernetes and container orchestration experience
• Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and release processes
• Systems thinking: understanding how infrastructure design choices affect failure modes and recovery
• Familiarity with SLO/SLA frameworks.
  
  

Track record as a trusted advisor across engineering organizations

• Experience driving org-wide process and cultural changes
• Strong written communication (design docs, one-pagers, runbooks)
• Post-mortem facilitation experience
• Experience with async collaboration across time zones
  
  

Large company experience navigating reliability/incident programs at 500+ engineer organizations·

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

Multi-cloud experience (minimum 2+ of AWS/GCP/Azure).

Modern CI/CD, GitHub, AI-assisted workflows—you'll have the freedom to build what you need.