Senior Software Engineer - Confluent Kora

**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** The Kora Group Coordinator team is responsible for the core coordination layer that ensures large fleets of consumers and transactional workloads within Kora remain balanced, fault-tolerant, and predictable. We are transitioning from broker-embedded coordination to a standalone, cloud-native service, prompting us to rethink how group membership, state, and metadata are stored, replicated, and recovered at scale. The challenges we address are at the intersection of distributed systems, storage, and cloud operations: designing replicated state machines, managing high-volume, low-latency traffic, handling failures and rebalances gracefully, and achieving all of this across multiple regions and tenants while meeting strict reliability and performance requirements. What You Will Do: ● Build and improve backend systems that power K2 Group Coordinator, with a focus on correctness, scalability, fault tolerance and performance. ● Develop features and fixes in the K2 GC area, including group coordination workflows, service behavior, and integrations with underlying K2 components and dependencies. ● Work on reliability and operational excellence for K2 GC by improving observability, dashboards, alerts, runbooks, and debugging workflows. ● Participate in production readiness efforts such as rollouts, configuration changes, migration planning, and rollback safety for K2 GC. ● Diagnose and resolve issues related to latency, errors, saturation, concurrency bottlenecks, and dependency failures in distributed production systems. ● Collaborate closely with adjacent teams across broker, storage, partition service, DevProd, and fleet/operator surfaces to ship and operate changes safely. ● Contribute to engineering quality through strong design discussions, thoughtful implementation, testing, and clear operational handoff documentation. **Required technical and professional expertise** ● Strong backend engineering fundamentals, with experience building production services in distributed systems environments. ● Hands-on development experience in one or more modern backend languages such as Java, Scala, or Go. ● Proficiency in designing systems for scalability, fault tolerance, high availability, and low-latency or high-throughput execution. ● Solid grasp of data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and performance-oriented problem solving. ● Experience debugging production issues using logs, metrics, dashboards, and systematic root-cause analysis. ● Working knowledge of cloud-native and cloud-first engineering principles, including designing services that are observable, resilient, operable and safe to roll out in large-scale environments. ● Experience or working knowledge of Kubernetes and containerized service operations in cloud environments. ● Ability to work effectively across design, implementation, rollout and operational support boundaries. ● Clear written and verbal communication, especially during technical reviews and production issue handling. **Preferred technical and professional experience** ● Experience with Kafka or adjacent messaging/streaming systems. ● Familiarity with distributed systems concepts such as replication, sharding, consistency models, and consensus. ● Exposure to cloud infrastructure and large-scale service operations across AWS, GCP, or Azure. ● Experience working on operational tooling, runbooks, migrations or reliability improvements for business-critical systems. ● Open source contributions, especially in distributed systems, data infrastructure, or developer tooling are a strong plus. 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.