Senior Software Engineer - Confluent Cloud Infrastructure & Platform

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. With Confluent, data doesn’t sit still. We put information in motion, streaming in near real time so organizations can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them.

Your Role And Responsibilities

Backend engineers at Confluent build the cloud services and systems that power our data streaming platform. You’ll work on large-scale, distributed backend systems that need to be highly available, reliable, and easy to operate.

This is a general backend role used across multiple product and platform teams. Depending on your background and interests, you may work on areas such as core platform services, governance and metadata, observability and telemetry, security and access, or customer-facing application experiences. We’ll align you to a team during the hiring process based on your skills and what excites you.

You’ll partner closely with other engineers, product managers, and designers to ship features end to end — from design and implementation to rollout and ongoing operation in production.

What You Will Do

• Design, build, and operate backend services that are secure, reliable, and scalable in a cloud-native environment.
• Own features and projects end to end: requirements, design, implementation, testing, rollout, and ongoing improvements.
• Work with distributed systems and microservices, with a focus on performance, resiliency, and clear API contracts.
• Contribute to service reliability and operations, including monitoring, alerting, and on-call participation where applicable.
• Collaborate with partner teams on architecture, data modeling, and integration points across Confluent’s platform.
• Write clean, well-tested, and well-documented code, and participate in code reviews that raise the bar for the team.
• Help improve engineering practices, tools, and automation to make it easier and safer to ship code.
• Contribute to a healthy team culture through clear communication, inclusive collaboration, and a willingness to learn and teach.

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• Experience designing, building, and supporting backend systems in production.
• Strong programming and algorithmic skills in at least one major language (for example, Java, Go, C/C++, or Python), and the ability to learn new languages and frameworks as needed.
• Experience with distributed systems or large-scale backend services, such as microservices, data pipelines, event-driven architectures, or high-throughput APIs.
• Hands-on experience deploying and operating services on a public cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including knowledge of containers and orchestration tools (for example, Docker and Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with databases and storage systems, such as relational databases, NoSQL stores, or distributed data systems, and an understanding of performance and scalability tradeoffs.
• A focus on quality and reliability, including testing strategies, observability (metrics, logging, tracing), and incident response best practices.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively with cross-functional partners across time zones.
• A growth mindset: you’re curious, open to feedback, and comfortable working in areas that may be new to you.

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• L3 Support Engineering: Exposure to L3 support engineering practices, including designing, developing, and testing solutions to resolve complex customer-reported problems.
• DevOps Engineering: Experience working with DevOps engineering principles, contributing to the automated CI/CD pipeline, and ensuring seamless integration and delivery.
• Front-End Development: Exposure to front-end development technologies, designing, developing, testing, and delivering offerings using leading-edge and/or proven technologies.