Senior Software Engineer II - Confluent

IBM

Education
Benefits
Special Commitments
Skills

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.

Required education

Bachelor's Degree

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.

Years of Experience:

5 - 10

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence—from machine learning to generative AI—to help make organizations more responsive, productive, and resilient. IBM Software helps clients put AI into action now to create real value with trust, speed, and confidence across digital labor, IT automation, application modernization, security, and sustainability. Critical to this is the ability to make use of all data, because AI is only as good as the data that fuels it. In most organizations data is spread across multiple clouds, on premises, in private datacenters, and at the edge. IBM’s AI and data platform scales and accelerates the impact of AI with trusted data, and provides leading capabilities to train, tune and deploy AI across business. IBM’s hybrid cloud platform is one of the most comprehensive and consistent approach to development, security, and operations across hybrid environments—a flexible foundation for leveraging data, wherever it resides, to extend AI deep into a business.

YOUR LIFE @ IBM

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.

Are you ready to be an IBMer?

ABOUT IBM

IBM’s greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we’re also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.

At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it’s time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.

IBM is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILS

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Confirmed 30+ days ago. Posted 2 days ago.

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