Senior Software Engineer - Confluent

Introduction

At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the worldâ€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. Youâ€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 IBMâ€s product and technology landscape. Here, youâ€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, work on a set of diverse and complex challenges, such as building foundational cloud frameworks and services that power all components of the platform in the Cloud. We are building a multi-tenant, multi-cloud, cloud-native compute substrate to enable seamless data integration across Confluent Cloud.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you think strategically and you help drive end-to-end technical delivery from the customer experience to scaling internal operations. You leverage your growing expertise in cloud-native, distributed systems to help take our execution platform to the next level. You care deeply about the key operational aspects (availability, reliability, performance, monitoring, capacity planning, and disaster recovery) of our Connect Platform, helping ensure we provide a highly available, resilient, and secure environment that our largest customers can rely on to run 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 for integrating with external data systems.
• Scale and optimize connector performance: Solve complex challenges in the stream processing space using cloud and on-premises resources to improve the performance, scalability, and elasticity of Kafka Connectors.
• Troubleshoot & debug: Dive into a complex technical stack that includes microservices, Kubernetes, containers, and virtualization to resolve issues and optimize performance.
• Support operational excellence: Participate in on-call rotations, ensure the operational readiness of our services, and help the team meet availability and performance SLA commitments.
• Innovate & improve: Act as a proactive engineer who identifies and suggests architectural, process, and operational improvements.
  
  

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• 4+ years of industry experience designing, building, and supporting backend systems in production.
• Solid engineering fundamentals with a deep focus on software quality, code reviews, documentation, and automated testing.
• Strong 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 using modern tools (e.g., Kubernetes, Helm, Docker).
• Operational awareness, with experience participating in on-call rotations and a strong desire to build reliable, production-grade cloud services.
• Self-starter mentality, with the ability to work effectively in a team and excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Collaborative mindset, featuring a strong sense of customer centricity, teamwork, and a drive to learn and grow alongside your 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).
• Prior experience working with or extending the internal architecture of Apache Kafka or Kafka Connect.