Confluent - Senior Software Engineer II - Fleet Management Unified Deployment

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 As a Senior Software Engineer II on the Fleet Management Unified Deployment team, you will play a key role in building and evolving the systems that manage the lifecycle of Confluent software across Confluent Cloud. Our platform orchestrates deployment, upgrades, recovery, and operational management across thousands of environments globally and across all major cloud providers, providing a unified control plane for safe, scalable, and consistent service operations. You'll work on critical systems including:

• Unified Deployment Control Plane: Build and evolve the control plane that manages software rollout, upgrades, recovery, and lifecycle operations across large multi-cloud fleets.
• Fleet Lifecycle Orchestration: Develop systems that coordinate placement, maintenance, state transitions, and recovery workflows for services running across Confluent Cloud.
• Platform APIs & Abstractions: Design and enhance APIs that provide clean abstractions for deployment workflows, service lifecycle management, and fleet-wide operational controls.
• Cloud Platform Integration: Build and optimize integrations with the broader Confluent Cloud platform to enable seamless end-to-end operations across AWS, GCP, and Azure.
• Multi-Tenancy & Security: Implement and strengthen isolation, security controls, and safe operational boundaries across deployment and runtime management systems.
• Observability & Operations: Drive operational excellence through monitoring, automated health checks, remediation workflows, and self-healing capabilities.

This job can be performed from anywhere in the US Required technical and professional expertise

• 6+ years of experience delivering scalable software solutions.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes, including controller development, operator patterns, and multi-cluster architectures.
• Strong proficiency in Go, with experience building production-grade backend or platform services.
• Experience with fleet-wide lifecycle management, deployment orchestration, or cloud infrastructure automation.
• Experience running production services in cloud environments, with strong knowledge of reliability, networking, and security fundamentals.
• Proven ability to independently own significant technical projects and collaborate effectively across teams.

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Experience with multi-tenant platform architectures and security isolation patterns.
• Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, and API design for internal platform services.
• Demonstrated track record of mentorship and technical leadership.

IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and 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, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status. IBM