Senior Software Engineer II, Confluent Secure Compute

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 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, where you’ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation.

Confluent puts information in motion, streaming data in near real time so organizations can react faster, build smarter, and deliver dynamic experiences. We are at the beginning of a journey to make it as easy as possible for anyone to use Confluent's products, including Kafka, to build their next killer streaming application. We’re looking for great engineers to join our world-class team, passionate about building and running large-scale, multi-tenant distributed systems for customers that expect high availability.

About the Role

Backend engineers at Confluent work on 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 new multi-tenant, multi-cloud, polyglot, cloud-native compute substrate to enable new business opportunities across Confluent Cloud (including Connect, Apache Flink, Kafka, and more).

As a senior software engineer, you will think strategically and drive end-to-end technical delivery—from customer experience to scaling internal operations. You will leverage your expertise in cloud-native, large-scale distributed systems to help take our platform to the next level. You will focus on key operational aspects (availability, reliability, performance, monitoring, emergency response, capacity planning, disaster recovery) to ensure a highly-available, resilient, and secure offering that our largest customers can rely on.

Responsibilities

• Own and lead the design and implementation of complex backend services and systems in a cloud-native, microservices-based environment.
• Make architecture and technical decisions that balance reliability, scalability, performance, and operability, and clearly communicate the tradeoffs.
• Drive projects end to end: from requirements and design through implementation, rollout, and ongoing operation in production.
• Improve service reliability and operations by defining SLOs/SLAs, strengthening observability, and participating in on-call as needed.
• Collaborate across teams to define APIs, integration points, and data models that keep the platform coherent and evolvable.
• Identify and drive platform and productivity improvements (tooling, automation, process) that raise the bar for the broader engineering organization.
• Mentor and support other engineers through code reviews, design reviews, and technical guidance, helping grow the team’s capabilities.
• Contribute to a culture of continuous improvement, inclusive collaboration, and high technical standards.

This job can be performed from anywhere in the US.

Requirements

• 5+ years of industry experience designing, building, and supporting backend systems in production with a solid grasp of good software engineering practices such as code reviews, deep focus on quality, and documentation.
• Strong knowledge of Python runtime environments (virtual environments, package management, and interpreter configurations).
• Strong programming and algorithmic skills. Proficiency in a major programming language, e.g., Python, Go, C/C++, Java, etc.
• Strong experience running services in a public cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including containers and orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) and modern cloud-native technologies.
• Expertise in other language runtimes/VMs (JVM/WASM, etc.) is a big plus.
• A track record of technical leadership: driving projects, influencing architecture, and coordinating work across multiple engineers or teams.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to align stakeholders, explain complex ideas clearly, and drive decisions.
• Experience with observability and operational excellence (metrics, logging, tracing, incident response, and postmortems).
• Education in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven track record of leading the delivery of large-scale, highly available, low-latency, high-quality systems.
• Deep hands-on technical expertise in large-scale systems engineering, distributed systems, and container sandboxing technologies.
• On-call experience handling critical systems.