Staff Software Engineer - Confluent Business Technology

IBM
IBM

Software Engineering, IT

California, USA · Tokyo, Japan · Texas City, TX, USA

Posted on Jun 25, 2026
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
About Team

The Business Technology team builds the internal applications that act as Confluent’s central nervous system for revenue, forecasting, and operational efficiency. We deliver strategic internal web applications that power deal lifecycle workflows, quoting, pricing and tiering, and planning tools used by Sales, Finance, and Customer teams.

Our products enable data driven decision making before resources are committed, helping stakeholders plan proactively, optimize usage, and manage spend with confidence. The team focuses on high business impact internal–facing applications with mission critical outcomes for growth, efficiency, and scale.

About the Role

We are seeking an exceptional Staff Software Engineer who combines deep technical expertise with the ability to shape architecture, influence cross functional partners, and drive open ended initiatives across teams. You will own the end to end design and delivery of complex systems, identify high leverage problems, and set patterns that other engineers follow.

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys solving real business problems with pragmatic, maintainable solutions more than building at massive consumer scale, and who can operate comfortably from hands-on implementation through technical strategy and stakeholder leadership.

What You’ll Do

● Lead the architecture, design, and implementation of high impact internal web applications that support deal lifecycle, pricing and quoting, forecasting, and planning workflows.

● Own complex, cross team technical initiatives from problem framing through design, implementation, rollout, and long term evolution.

● Identify and drive high leverage technical investments that improve reliability, performance, developer velocity, and user experience across multiple applications and services.

● Design and evolve microservices, APIs, and data models that integrate with systems such as Salesforce, billing, data platforms, and analytics, ensuring robust contracts and clear boundaries.

● Partner closely with Product Managers and business stakeholders to translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical strategies, roadmaps, and deliverables over multi quarter horizons.

● Provide technical leadership and mentoring for senior and mid level engineers, raising the bar on design quality, code quality, observability, and operational excellence across the team.

● Champion engineering best practices including testing, performance engineering, incident readiness, and secure coding, and ensure they are consistently applied in your area of ownership.

● Collaborate with peer teams to define cohesive end to end solutions and shared platforms rather than point integrations.

● Contribute to and help refine the technical strategy, architecture principles, and career standards for the Commit Estimator and broader Application & AI Engineering domains.

● Contribute to modernize the existing application and platform for scalability, availability, speed of delivering software and enabling AI capabilities for End Users .

Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
  • 12+ years of software engineering experience, including technical architecture for complex, business-critical systems.
  • Strong full stack expertise (Go, Java, APIs/services, React or similar front ends) with solid foundations in system design and data structures.
  • Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and distributed systems technologies like Kafka or messaging/event streaming.
  • Proven ability to design and deliver scalable internal/B2B applications, breaking down complex problems into clear solutions across multi-quarter initiatives.
  • Cloud-native experience (AWS, containers, CI/CD, observability) with a track record of improving developer productivity, operational excellence, and mentoring teams.
Preferred technical and professional experience
  • Familiarity with IBM-Confluent Products and Services.

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM 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.

YOUR LIFE @ IBM

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.

Are you ready to be an IBMer?

ABOUT IBM

IBM’s greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we’re also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.

At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it’s time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.

IBM 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, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILS

IBM 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.

See more open positions at IBM