Confluent - Principal Engineer - Cloud Infrastructure and Platform

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: We’re seeking a strategic and hands‑on technical leader to define and drive Confluent’s internal agentic AI capabilities, and adoption of smart, automated decisioning systems for R&D productivity. In this role, you will partner across Engineering, Security, and IT to scale AI usage across our platform to accelerate value for customers and the business.

You will operationalize a vision where AI augments developers, automates routine tasks, and orchestrates intelligent workflows that unlock new usage patterns.

What You Will Do:

• Strategy & Vision
  • Define and evangelize the AI and agentic flows strategy — aligning business metrics, engineering needs, and platform opportunities.
  • Build a roadmap for introducing agentic automation features, smart assistants, and AI‑driven workflows across all aspects of engineering.
  • Identify and resolve bottlenecks across the entire product and software development life cycle.
• Cross‑Functional Leadership
  • Partner with Engineering, Trust and Security to integrate AI capabilities responsibly and at scale.
  • Operationalize AI adoption internally and share use cases externally
  • Drive complex cross‑team projects requiring multi‑stakeholder alignment
  • Continuously raise the bar for code/architectural quality across engineering
• Execution & Delivery
  • Lead the delivery of core agentic workflows that improves productivity across engineering
  • Balance of hands‑on contributions with effective delegation to others. Expect 60% execution and 40% strategy setting.
  • Drive measurable adoption of AI tooling and flows with internal teams
• Governance & Best Practices
  • Ability to adopt industry standards, ethical frameworks, guardrails, and quality metrics for AI behavior and automated flows.
  • Define success metrics and KPIs (e.g., AI‑driven usage lift, automation ROI, reduction in manual workflows).
• Thought Leadership
  • Participate in external forums — conferences, podcasts, customer briefings on occasion
  • Evolve as the technology landscape shifts
  • Write internal playbooks for building and scaling agentic outcomes.

Required education

Bachelor's Degree

Preferred education

Master's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

• Technical and Product Acumen
  • 8+ years driving strategic productivity initiatives, ideally in SaaS/Cloud platforms or developer tools with some proven experience in AI initiatives.
  • Considered an expert in building distributed systems and/or the infrastructure and tools to support it.
• Proven ability to lead cross‑functional teams and influence senior stakeholders without direct authority.
• Strong communicator who can translate complex technical strategies into impact‑oriented outcomes.
• Execution Focus
  • Demonstrated track record delivering products or features that generated measurable business value.
  • Comfortable defining success criteria, metrics, and ROI for ambiguous, future‑facing domains.
• AI/ML & Automation
  • Hands‑on experience with AI or adjacent AI/ML platform experience with LLM integration and workflow automation, with demonstrated appetite to build toward agentic patterns
  • Deep understanding of responsible AI practices and governance.
• Customer & Business Mindset
  • Passion for solving real customer problems with elegant, scalable solutions.
  • Ability to tie technical efforts directly to business KPIs (adoption, retention, revenue impact).

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Prior leadership in scaling internal AI platforms or driving AI adoption across large organizations.
• Background in real‑time data, event‑driven architecture, or platform engineering.

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.

Date posted

30-Sep-2026

Job ID

133985

State / Province

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

Country

United States

Work arrangement

Remote

Area of work

Software Engineering

Employment type

Regular

Contract type

Regular

Projected Minimum Salary per year

192,000.00

Projected Maximum Salary per year

358,000.00

Position type

Professional

Some travel may be required based on business demand

Company

(0147) International Business Machines Corporation

Shift

General (daytime)