Senior Software Engineer - Confluent DevProd

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

About this role:

Our team sits within the Developer Productivity (DevProd) organization and is responsible for ensuring that Confluent engineers can safely and efficiently build, test, and operate our cloud at scale. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will design, build, and operate internal platform services and tools that improve developer experience and overall engineering velocity. You’ll take ownership of meaningful projects—often with some ambiguity—partnering with senior engineers and stakeholders to shape solutions, implement them, and support them in production and critical pre‑prod environments.

This role is ideal for someone who:

Enjoys platform services work: multi-tenant, internal-facing services used by hundreds of engineers.

Cares deeply about testability, reliability, and developer experience in complex,

distributed systems.

Thrives in R&D-leaning, somewhat ambiguous spaces where you prototype, iterate, and converge on the right solution.

Is curious about practical AI-assisted developer workflows and comfortable learning and evaluating new tools.

Is highly self-driven, naturally takes initiative, and does things that are important without being asked.

What You Will Do:

Build and operate internal developer platform services — design secure, multi-tenant, and scalable services that integrate into existing DevProd systems (e.g., CI/CD, test infrastructure, developer portals), and own their reliability, performance, and monitoring.

Improve pre-production and performance testing capabilities — model realistic workloads and stress scenarios, automate performance/scale/regression tests as part of CI/CD, and provide actionable, self-service reporting that helps teams quickly see where their services break or degrade.

Explore and integrate AI-assisted workflows for developers — evaluate AI tools and frameworks, run data-driven experiments, and, where they add real value, productionize workflows such as triage assistants, anomaly detection over pre‑prod metrics, or intelligent test selection, with appropriate guardrails and visibility.

Deliver projects end to end in a collaborative way — frame problems, write clear design docs, break work into milestones, drive implementation with your peers, and participate in rollout plans that include documentation, training, and feedback loops with partner teams.

Contribute to team and engineering culture — participate in on-call and incident response for the components you own, write clear documentation, mentor junior engineers through design and code reviews, and help evolve best practices for DevProd and platform engineering.

This job can be performed from anywhere in the US

Required technical and professional expertise

Education & Experience - BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related field (or equivalent experience), and at least 5 years of professional software engineering experience building and operating cloud services, platforms, or large-scale distributed systems.

Technical & Platform Depth - Strong fundamentals in distributed systems and reliability; proficiency in at least one statically typed language (e.g., Java, Go) plus a scripting language (e.g., Python); experience with DevProd/DevOps tooling such as CI/CD, containers, and infrastructure-as-code.

Execution & Ownership - Demonstrated ability to independently drive projects from design through rollout, breaking work into milestones, managing risk, and delivering high-quality outcomes on time.

Collaboration & Leadership - Strong written and verbal communication skills; experience mentoring other engineers, leading design and code reviews, and influencing cross-functional stakeholders in a platform setting.

Operational Excellence - Proven track record owning services in production or critical pre‑prod environments, including on-call, incident response, and postmortems, with a strong bias towards automation to reduce toil and improve reliability.

AI Awareness - Practical experience or strong interest in integrating AI/ML or LLM-based capabilities into developer or platform workflows, along with an understanding of how to design sensible guardrails and instrumentation for safe use. You don’t need to be an AI expert, but you’re comfortable evaluating and adopting new tools.

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Leading-Edge Technologies: Experience with designing, developing, and delivering software solutions using leading-edge technologies, including back-end and front-end development, and DevOps engineering. • Agile Collaboration: Experience working in an Agile environment, collaborating with stakeholders to understand requirements and deliver high-quality software solutions. • Automated CI/CD Pipelines: Experience contributing to automated CI/CD pipelines, ensuring seamless integration and delivery of software solutions.

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.