Senior Software Engineer II - Confluent Platform Team

**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 Confluent Platform Team is fully based out of India. Confluent Platform team’s mission is to provide best-in class full-scale data streaming platform in any BYOI - Bring Your Own Infra setup - from developer’s laptop to private cloud infrastructure. Businesses need real time stream systems to react and make decisions quickly at scale. Designing systems for such use-cases will require a data-streaming platform. Confluent is the leader in data-in-motion with Confluent Platform as the streaming product. We intend to make this platform and expertise available to everyone and everywhere - be it private cloud or open source tech community. Provide "Confluent" experience on private cloud. * CP generates 45% of the Confluent revenue for the company as of 2025. We provide customers with a strong product roadmap, security fixes and in-time support. We help them leverage existing investments in private data centers for all data in-motion use-cases. * Enable customers can take advantage of Confluent Cloud innovations alongside their private cloud by providing connected cloud features. * Gather Tech Community’s mind-share with Confluent Platform. * Enhance Kafka and Confluent Developer Experience. What You Will Do: * You will work with a team of engineers and architects to help evolve the Confluent Platform * The charter of the CP team has been continuously expanding since its inception. You will technically drive the advancements in ever expanding CP Charter. * We want to ensure the quality of deliverables holds the bar - you will design and build tech for this. * Crafting code for provisioning, rolling upgrades, scaling clusters, multi-region deployments, disaster recovery, and secure configuration management. * Collaborating with cross-functional teams to drive the development of innovative solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers. * Championing open-source community building initiatives, leveraging your passion for fostering collaboration and knowledge-sharing. * CP on-call - how do we embedded tech to ensure debuggability and support across components are improved. How do we make it self-serve issue fixes for customers and L1 support. * Mentor a junior team of high-performing engineers, helping them to continue in growing their skill set through hands-on experience and mentorship. * We want to bring the latest K8S ecosystem to our CFK - how do we leverage the progress here to benefit our customers. **Required technical and professional expertise** * 7+ years of hands-on software development experience with the ability to anticipate future technical needs for the product and craft plans to realize them. Taking ideas to production is something we look for. * Experience building and operating large-scale systems. Solid understanding of basic systems operations (disk, network, operating systems, etc). Experience running production services in the cloud. * Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development. Solid fundamentals in concurrent and multi-threading programming. * A self starter with the ability to work effectively in teams. Proactively identifying the symptoms of technical issues and reason about their causes is needed. This will be followed by fixing the root causes. * Timely shipping of deliverables; being able to trade-off short term technical decisions with the long term.Move fast, build in increments, and iterate. A sense of urgency, a mindset towards achieving results, and excellent prioritization skills. * Ability to influence the team, peers and upper management in technology decisions using effective communication and collaborative techniques * Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent experience. Understanding of various technologies, programming paradigms and frameworks is needed. Ability to be pragmatic and trade off their usage in production is essential. * Ability to take on intense customer productions issues on-call; debugging and mitigating them will be needed. This requires patient log and metrics analysis with solid reasoning to nail the issue. **Preferred technical and professional experience** * Experience in Open-source technologies * Experience in K8S, Ansible * Hands on experience in Hybrid Cloud environment * Hands on experience in Kafka 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.