Senior Software Engineer II - Confluent Cloud 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

Senior Software Engineers II at Confluent take ownership of critical backend systems that underpin our data streaming platform. You’ll lead the design and delivery of large-scale, distributed services that must be secure, highly available, and easy to operate across regions and clouds.

This is a general backend role used across multiple teams. Depending on your background, you may focus on areas like core platform services, governance and metadata, observability and telemetry, security and access, or customer-facing application services. We’ll align you to a team during the process based on your experience, interests, and business needs.

You’ll act as a technical leader: setting direction for projects, making architecture decisions, mentoring engineers, and partnering with cross-functional stakeholders to ship high-impact work.

What You Will Do

• Own and lead the design and implementation of complex backend services and systems in a cloud-native, microservices-based environment.
• Make architecture and technical decisions that balance reliability, scalability, performance, and operability, and clearly communicate the tradeoffs.
• Drive projects end to end: from requirements and design through implementation, rollout, and ongoing operation in production.
• Improve service reliability and operations by defining SLOs/SLAs, strengthening observability, and participating in on-call as needed.
• Collaborate across teams to define APIs, integration points, and data models that keep the platform coherent and evolvable.
• Identify and drive platform and productivity improvements (tooling, automation, process) that raise the bar for the broader engineering organization.
• Mentor and support other engineers through code reviews, design reviews, and technical guidance, helping grow the team’s capabilities.
• Contribute to a culture of continuous improvement, inclusive collaboration, and high technical standards.

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• 7+ years of experience building, scaling, and operating backend systems in production.
• Strong programming expertise in at least one major backend language (Java, Go, C/C++, or Python) with solid fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and system design.
• Experience with distributed systems, including event-driven architectures, high-throughput services, or large-scale data pipelines, with an understanding of consistency, fault tolerance, and performance tradeoffs.
• Cloud and infrastructure proficiency, including running services on AWS/GCP/Azure, containers (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), and modern deployment practices.
• Operational and leadership capabilities, including experience with databases (SQL/NoSQL), observability (metrics, logging, tracing), incident response, and driving technical projects with strong communication and collaboration skills.

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Experience building or operating mission-critical, multi-tenant, or multi-region services with strict availability and latency requirements.
• Familiarity with data streaming technologies such as Apache Kafka, Flink, or similar systems.
• Previous work in security, governance, or compliance-sensitive backend domains.