Senior Software Engineer II - Confluent

Introduction

At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world.

Your Role And Responsibilities

About the Role

Backend Engineers at Confluent tackle some of the most complex challenges in cloud computing, including building the foundational frameworks and services that power the Confluent Cloud platform.

We are developing a new multi-tenant, multi-cloud, polyglot, cloud-native compute substrate that enables new business opportunities across Confluent Cloud, including Kafka, Kafka Connect, Apache Flink, and other platform services.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will think strategically and help drive end-to-end technical delivery, from customer experience to scaling internal operations. You'll leverage your expertise in cloud-native and large-scale distributed systems to advance the platform while ensuring excellence across key operational areas such as availability, reliability, performance, monitoring, incident response, capacity planning, and disaster recovery. Your work will help ensure that our Compute Platform remains highly available, resilient, secure, and trusted by our largest customers.

What You Will Do

• Build mission-critical infrastructure: Design, develop, and operationalize high-performance, scalable, and resilient backend services that form the core of the Connect Cloud Platform.
• Develop the execution engine: Build the orchestration, auto-scaling, and lifecycle management systems required to reliably run thousands of distributed Kafka Connect workloads in a multi-tenant cloud environment.
• Ensure robust isolation and security: Solve complex distributed systems challenges to provide strong resource isolation, security, and performance guarantees for diverse workloads running on a shared platform.
• Troubleshoot and debug: Dive deep into a complex technical stack that includes microservices, Kubernetes, containers, and virtualization technologies to resolve critical production issues.
• Drive operational excellence: Ensure operational readiness and consistently meet availability and performance SLA commitments for customers.
• Innovate and improve: Act as a strategic engineer who continuously identifies and implements architectural, process, and operational improvements.
  
  

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• 8+ years of experience designing, building, scaling, and supporting backend systems in production environments.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including code reviews, quality-focused development practices, testing, and documentation.
• Strong programming and algorithmic skills, with proficiency in one or more major programming languages such as Java, Go, C/C++, or Python.
• Experience configuring and deploying distributed systems and microservices using modern technologies such as Kubernetes, Helm, and related cloud-native tooling.
• Strong project delivery, collaboration, and communication skills.
• Experience driving operational excellence for large-scale production services.
• A customer-centric mindset with a passion for teamwork, technical leadership, mentorship, and organizational success.
• Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
  
  

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Proven track record of designing and delivering large-scale, highly available, low-latency, and high-quality distributed systems.
• Hands-on expertise in large-scale systems engineering and distributed systems architecture.
• Experience building and operating cloud-native platforms in multi-tenant environments.
• Familiarity with Kafka, stream processing technologies, and modern cloud infrastructure patterns.
• Deep understanding of reliability engineering, scalability, performance optimization, and observability best practices.