Senior Software Engineer - Confluent

IBM
IBM

Software Engineering

Remote

Posted on Oct 27, 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

Backend engineers at Confluent, work on a set of diverse and complex challenges, such as building foundational cloud frameworks and services that power all components of the platform in the Cloud. We are building a multi-tenant, multi-cloud, cloud-native compute substrate to enable seamless data integration across Confluent Cloud.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you think strategically and you help drive end-to-end technical delivery from the customer experience to scaling internal operations. You leverage your growing expertise in cloud-native, distributed systems to help take our execution platform to the next level. You care deeply about the key operational aspects (availability, reliability, performance, monitoring, capacity planning, and disaster recovery) of our Connect Platform, helping ensure we provide a highly available, resilient, and secure environment that our largest customers can rely on to run their mission-critical data pipelines.

What You Will Do

● Build mission-critical infrastructure: Develop, test, and operationalize high-performance, scalable, and resilient backend services.

● Build and evolve Kafka connectors: Design, develop, and maintain Kafka Connect connectors for integrating with external data systems.

● Scale and optimize connector performance: Solve complex challenges in the stream processing space using cloud and on-premises resources to improve the performance, scalability, and elasticity of Kafka Connectors.

● Troubleshoot & debug: Dive into a complex technical stack that includes microservices, Kubernetes, containers, and virtualization to resolve issues and optimize performance.

● Support operational excellence: Participate in on-call rotations, ensure the operational readiness of our services, and help the team meet availability and performance SLA commitments.

● Innovate & improve: Act as a proactive engineer who identifies and suggests architectural, process, and operational improvements.

Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise

● 4+ years of industry experience designing, building, and supporting backend systems in production.

● Solid engineering fundamentals with a deep focus on software quality, code reviews, documentation, and automated testing.

● Strong programming and algorithmic skills, with proficiency in major programming languages such as Java, Go, C/C++, or Python.

● Cloud-native experience, including hands-on experience or strong familiarity with configuring and deploying distributed systems and microservices using modern tools (e.g., Kubernetes, Helm, Docker).

● Operational awareness, with experience participating in on-call rotations and a strong desire to build reliable, production-grade cloud services.

● Self-starter mentality, with the ability to work effectively in a team and excellent written and verbal communication skills.

● Collaborative mindset, featuring a strong sense of customer centricity, teamwork, and a drive to learn and grow alongside your peers.

● Educational background: BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.

Preferred technical and professional experience

● Experience contributing to large-scale, highly available, low-latency, and high-throughput data systems.

● Knowledge of control planes, data planes, and multi-tenant resource management in public clouds (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

● Prior experience working with or extending the internal architecture of Apache Kafka® or Kafka Connect.

Years of Experience:
4 - 8

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.

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