Introduction
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Your role and responsibilities
As a Staff Software Engineer at Confluent, you will take ownership of critical backend systems in Stream Governance products that underpin our data streaming platform. You'll lead the design and delivery of large-scale, distributed services that must be secure, highly available, and easy to operate across regions and clouds.
The Stream Governance product portfolio is crucial to achieving Confluent's mission to put event streaming at the heart of every organization. Our mission is to provide a robust, cloud-native platform that ensures data quality and integrity by standardizing structure and enforcing intelligent rules across every stream. You will be responsible for delivering critical functionalities like Confluent Schema Registry, Data Contracts, and Policies.
In this role, you will collaborate closely with the team and key stakeholders to design, architect, and develop cloud-native, multi-tenant services for Stream Governance. You will be responsible for guiding the vision, providing technical leadership, mentoring, and enabling a high-performing engineering team to tackle complex distributed data challenges at scale.
You'll act as a technical leader: setting direction for projects, making architecture decisions, mentoring engineers, and partnering with cross-functional stakeholders to ship high-impact work.
What You Will Do
- Develop and architect the cloud-native Stream Governance platform - a multi-tenant, highly available, and scalable service for Kafka and real-time data.
- Own and lead the end-to-end design and implementation of complex backend services within a cloud-native, microservices-based environment.
- Drive projects from requirements and design through implementation, rollout, and ongoing operation in production.
- Make architecture and technical decisions that thoughtfully balance reliability, scalability, performance, and operability.
- Solve complicated technical projects with high quality, provide specialized technical guidance to the team, and mentor/support other engineers through code reviews and design reviews.
- Evaluate and enhance the efficiency of our platform's technology stack, ensuring we keep pace with industry trends and adopt state-of-the-art solutions.
- Take responsibility for developing, managing, and maintaining a mission-critical service with a 99.99 SLA running across 100+ AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure regions.
- Partner across engineering and with other key stakeholders to create and execute the overall roadmap for delivering a top-notch Data Streaming Platform.
- Contribute to a culture of continuous improvement, inclusive collaboration, and high technical standards.
Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
- 10+ years of industry experience designing, building, scaling, and operating backend systems in production.
- Deep proficiency in at least one major backend programming language (e.g., Java, Go, C/C++, or Python) and strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and system design.
- Hands-on experience with distributed systems, such as event-driven architectures, high-throughput services, or large-scale data pipelines. A strong understanding of consistency, fault tolerance, and performance tradeoffs.
- Strong experience running production services in a public cloud (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Azure), including containerized workloads (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
- Expertise in cloud-native technology, including networking & security, and experience being part of an oncall rotation.
- Proven experience in leading and mentoring technical teams.
- 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.
- BS, MS, or PhD in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Preferred technical and professional experience
- Experience building or operating mission-critical, multi-tenant, or multi-region services with strict availability and latency requirements.
- Familiarity with data streaming technologies such as Apache Kafka, Flink, or similar systems.
- Demonstrated impact beyond your immediate team, such as driving cross-org initiatives or technical vision.
- Contributions to open source, technical writing, or speaking that showcase technical depth.
ABOUT BUSINESS UNITIBM 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.
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OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILSIBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to:
- Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being
- Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs
- Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law
- Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals
- Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences
We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law.
This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role.
IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
