Senior Software Engineer - Confluent Kafka Team

IBM
IBM

Software Engineering

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Posted on Jul 9, 2026
Introduction

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Your role and responsibilities

About the Role:

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Tableflow team. In this role, you will build the critical components that turn Confluent Cloud data streams into open table formats. You will bridge the gap between operational streaming (Kafka) and analytical data lakes (Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake) by building the control plane and data plane components that materialize topics into tables in real-time.

About the Team:

We are a team of passionate engineers who love solving complex distributed systems and infrastructure problems. The Tableflow team creates the "intelligent connective tissue" between Confluent’s data streaming platform and the modern data lakehouse. The team’s work focuses on two core pillars:

  • Control Plane: Building the robust orchestration layer that manages the entire lifecycle of tables across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

  • Open Table Formats and Ecosystem: Building the translation logic to publish Kafka data as Tables (Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake) and also integrates with the Lakehouse ecosystem (AWS Glue, Unity Catalog).

What You Will Do:

  • Design and implement data plane components that publish data into open-table formats and integrate with the ecosystem.

  • Develop control plane services and APIs that orchestrate table lifecycles and resource management.

  • Contribute to relevant open-Source projects such as Apache Iceberg.

  • Own code quality, test coverage, documentation, and maintainability for your components.

  • Drive technical designs, leading discussions to curate and moderate decisions with stakeholders.

  • Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, and other engineering teams to deliver complex features.

  • Lead operational excellence by resolving high-severity incidents, building observability tools, and designing automated workflows to ensure 99.99% availability.

  • Be an active team player by leading meetings, taking initiative, and participating in on-call rotations.

Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
  • A degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.

  • 3+ years of hands-on software engineering experience.

  • Hands-on experience building services on public clouds (AWS, Azure, or GCP).

  • Self starter who is able to quickly ramp up on the important bits of our overall product.

  • Good understanding of distributed systems design and development.

  • Experience running production services, debugging complex integration issues, and driving post-mortems.

  • Ability to move fast and iterate with a sense of urgency while delivering results without surprises.

  • A growth mindset and the ability to collaborate effectively with team members and take on customer problems.

Preferred technical and professional experience
  • Experience using and/or working on data infrastructure such as SQL databases, Apache Kafka, Apache Flink or Apache Spark.

  • Hands-on experience with Open-Table Formats (Apache Iceberg, or Delta Lake) and Data Catalogs (Unity Catalog or AWS Glue).

  • Interest in evangelism: Giving talks at tech conferences, writing blog posts evangelizing your work

Years of Experience:
4 - 7

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.

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Are you ready to be an IBMer?

ABOUT IBM

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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.

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