Staff Site Reliability Engineer - Confluent Cloud Infrastructure

**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** Confluent Cloud processes millions of events per second across AWS, GCP, and Azure. When incidents happen in a multi-cloud streaming platform, they happen at scale—data in motion, exactly-once semantics, and cascading failure modes that require deep systems thinking. We need an expert-level engineer who can drive proactive reliability improvements that prevent these incidents before they occur. This role combines hands-on technical work with strategic program ownership. You'll spend roughly 75% of your time on engineering: building automation, improving tooling, analyzing systemic failure patterns, and designing reliability improvements. The remaining 25% is teaching and coordination: coaching teams through post-mortems, training incident commanders, and evolving our incident response practices. You'll be part of a global team with follow-the-sun coverage, with clean handoffs that keep everyone working sustainable hours. Confluent has 800-1000 engineers across highly autonomous teams. This role sits within Cloud Architecture and Reliability - Supportability (CAR-S), a horizontal team that owns reliability standards and tooling across engineering. You're the person who makes us need incident management less. What You Will Do: * Proactive Reliability Engineering (~75% of role) · Analyze systemic failure patterns and design improvements that prevent incident recurrence · Define and maintain SLO/SLA frameworks; use error budgets to guide reliability investments · Build tooling and automation to reduce incident response toil and scale team impact · Own Rootly configuration, workflows, and integrations with PagerDuty, Jira, Confluence, and Slack · Analyze reliability data to identify systemic improvements; build dashboards that drive action · Explore AI-assisted approaches to documentation quality and incident analysis · Design scalable reliability standards that reduce reactive workload over time. * Incident Management Program (~25% of role) · Own standards, practices, and continuous improvement of incident response · Serve as an on-call Incident Commander for production incidents, including acting as escalation IC when incidents exceed a team's management chain · Develop and deliver training programs for engineering teams at all levels · Coach teams through post-mortems and on developing actionable corrective actions * Customer Root Cause Analysis (CRCA) · Edit and review customer-facing incident documents to ensure quality and clarity · Drive turnaround SLAs while maintaining technical accuracy · Ensure clear explanation of what happened, why, and how we'll prevent recurrence * Cross-Team Leadership · Partner with engineering leaders to elevate reliability practices · Be the expert who teams proactively engage for guidance **Required technical and professional expertise** * 10+ years in SRE, incident management, or reliability engineering · Cloud experience with at least one of AWS, GCP, or Azure· * Deep expertise with incident management tooling (Rootly, PagerDuty, or similar platforms) * Strong understanding of distributed systems and failure modes at scale—Kafka/event streaming expertise preferred, or demonstrated rapid mastery of complex systems * Deep experience with observability: metrics, logging, tracing—ability to diagnose complex issues · Kubernetes and container orchestration experience · Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and release processes · Systems thinking: understanding how infrastructure design choices affect failure modes and recovery · Familiarity with SLO/SLA frameworks. * Track record as a trusted advisor across engineering organizations · Experience driving org-wide process and cultural changes · Strong written communication (design docs, one-pagers, runbooks) · Post-mortem facilitation experience · Experience with async collaboration across time zones * Large company experience navigating reliability/incident programs at 500+ engineer organizations· **Preferred technical and professional experience** * Multi-cloud experience (minimum 2+ of AWS/GCP/Azure). * Modern CI/CD, GitHub, AI-assisted workflows—you'll have the freedom to build what you need. 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.