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

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 complicated technical projects with high quality, provide specialized technical guidance to the team, and mentor/support other engineers through code reviews and design reviews.

* Evaluate and enhance the efficiency of our platform's technology stack, ensuring we keep pace with industry trends and adopt state-of-the-art solutions.

* Take responsibility for developing, managing, and maintaining a mission-critical service with a 99.99 SLA running across 100+ AWS, GCP, and Azure regions.

* Partner across engineering and with other key stakeholders to create and execute the overall roadmap for delivering a top-notch 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 building and operating scalable production-grade backend systems

* Strong proficiency in a major backend language (Java, Go, C/C++, or Python) with solid CS fundamentals (DSA, system design)

* Hands-on experience with distributed systems (event-driven, high-throughput, large-scale pipelines) and tradeoffs (consistency, fault tolerance, performance)

* Proven experience running cloud-native services (AWS/GCP/Azure) with containers (Docker/Kubernetes), including networking, security, and on-call responsibilities

* Demonstrated technical leadership-mentoring engineers, driving architecture, and influencing cross-team delivery with strong communication 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.

* Demonstrated impact beyond your immediate team, such as driving cross-org initiatives or technical vision.

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence-from machine learning to generative AI-to help make organizations…