Confluent - Staff Product Manager, Streaming Analytics Engine

IBM
IBM

Product, Data Science

Remote

Posted on Oct 2, 2026
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
About the Role:

Today, enterprises stitch together separate systems for streaming, analytics, and serving. Each of these systems come with its own latency, cost, and operational overhead. The next evolution of Confluent's platform collapses that complexity by continuously materializing streaming data into fast, queryable state that serves real-time analytics, operational applications, and downstream intelligent systems from a single foundation.

As a Staff Product Manager, you'll own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the core streaming analytics engine underlying Confluent's real-time data platform. This system sits at the intersection of stream processing, real-time analytical databases, and modern serving infrastructure, continuously transforming data in motion into low-latency, queryable materialized views that power AI agents, dashboards, operational queries, and event-driven applications. You'll own the engine: the storage, materialization, query layer, and performance, while partnering with peer product managers who own the downstream product experiences built on top of it.

This is a foundational, high-leverage role. You'll define a new product category that brings together concepts from streaming analytics, real-time OLAP, materialized views, and modern database systems into a cloud-native, streaming-first architecture. You'll partner directly with engineering, design, and senior leadership to bring this to market and position Confluent as a compelling alternative to standalone real-time analytical databases.

What You Will Do:
  • Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience.
  • Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative.
  • Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics.
  • Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale.
  • Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it.
  • Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning.
  • Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud.
  • Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area.
  • Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership.
Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
What You Will Bring:
  • Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
  • 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles.
  • 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch.
  • Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering.
  • Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space.
  • Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization.
  • Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership.
Preferred technical and professional experience
  • Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems.
  • Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user.
  • Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure.
  • Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery.
  • Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models.
  • Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects.

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.

See more open positions at IBM