Confluent -Senior Software Engineer - Stream Processing & Analytics

Additional Cities: Poughkeepsie, Lowell, Rochester, Tucson, Research Triangle Park, Armonk, Boston, Bellevue, Atlanta, San Jose, Dallas, Austin, San Francisco, Seattle

Additional States: Georgia, Minnesota, Texas, New York, North Carolina, Arizona, Washington, Massachusetts, California

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:

As a Senior Software Engineer II at Confluent, you will take ownership of critical backend systems in Stream Governance products 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.

The Stream Governance product portfolio is crucial to achieving Confluent’s mission to put event streaming at the heart of every organization. Our mission is to provide a robust, cloud-native platform that ensures data quality and integrity by standardizing structure and enforcing intelligent rules across every stream. You will be responsible for delivering critical functionalities like Confluent Schema Registry, Data Contracts, and Policies.

In this role, you will collaborate closely with the team and key stakeholders to design, architect, and develop cloud-native, multi-tenant services for Stream Governance. You will be responsible for guiding the vision, providing technical leadership, mentoring, and enabling a high-performing engineering team to tackle complex distributed data challenges at scale.

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:

• Develop and architect the cloud-native Stream Governance platform, a multi-tenant, highly available, and scalable service for Kafka and real-time data.
• Own and lead the end-to-end design and implementation of complex backend services within a cloud-native, microservices-based environment.
• Drive projects from requirements and design through implementation, rollout, and ongoing operation in production.
• Make architecture and technical decisions that thoughtfully balance reliability, scalability, performance, and operability.
• Solve complex technical challenges with high quality, provide specialized technical guidance to the team, and mentor and support engineers through code reviews and design reviews.
• Evaluate and enhance the efficiency of the platform's technology stack, ensuring the adoption of modern, industry-leading technologies and best practices.
• Take responsibility for developing, managing, and maintaining a mission-critical service with a 99.99% SLA operating across 100+ AWS, GCP, and Azure regions.
• Partner across engineering teams and key stakeholders to define and execute the roadmap for delivering a world-class data streaming platform.
• Contribute to a culture of continuous improvement, inclusive collaboration, and high technical standards.

Required education

Bachelor's Degree

Preferred education

Master's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

• 8+ years of industry experience designing, building, scaling, and operating backend systems in production.
• Deep proficiency in at least one major backend programming language (e.g., Java, Go, C/C++, or Python), with strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and system design.
• Hands-on experience with distributed systems, including event-driven architectures, high-throughput services, and large-scale data pipelines, with a strong understanding of consistency, fault tolerance, and performance tradeoffs.
• Strong experience operating production services in public cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including containerized workloads such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Expertise in cloud-native technologies, including networking and security, and experience participating in an on-call rotation.
• Proven experience leading and mentoring technical teams.
• Demonstrated track record of technical leadership, including driving projects, influencing architecture decisions, and coordinating work across multiple engineers and teams.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to align stakeholders, clearly articulate complex technical concepts, and drive informed decisions.
• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Experience building or operating mission-critical, multi-tenant, or multi-region services with stringent availability, reliability, and latency requirements.
• Familiarity with data streaming technologies such as Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, or similar distributed data processing systems.
• Demonstrated ability to drive impact beyond your immediate team through cross-functional initiatives, technical strategy, or organization-wide engineering improvements.
• Contributions to open-source projects, technical publications, blogs, conference presentations, or other forums that showcase technical expertise and thought leadership.

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

IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to:

• Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being
• Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long‑term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs
• Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law
• Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals
• Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences

We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law.

This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role.

IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.

The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full‑time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job‑related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro‑rated for those who start working during the calendar year.