Senior Software Engineer II - Confluent Cloud Platform

IBM
IBM

Software Engineering

United States · Richland, WA, USA · Kennewick, WA, USA · Pasco, WA, USA · West Richland, WA, USA

Posted on Jul 22, 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

We’re not just building better tech. We’re rewriting how data moves and what the world can do with it. With Confluent, data doesn’t sit still. Our platform puts information in motion, streaming in near real-time so companies can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them.

It takes a certain kind of person to join this team. Those who ask hard questions, give honest feedback, and show up for each other. No egos, no solo acts. Just smart, curious humans pushing toward something bigger, together.

Senior Software Engineers II at Confluent take ownership of critical backend systems 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 team owns a highly available, scalable metadata store — the source of truth that services across Confluent Cloud build on. It serves low-latency read and write APIs, and streams data in real time. The platform is a foundational backbone of a broader effort to re-architect Confluent Cloud and replacing bespoke, per-team datastores with a single self-serve platform.

Responsibilities

- Build and evolve the metadata platform — the read, write, and streaming APIs

- Solve hard distributed-systems problems — availability, consistency, sharding, scaling

- Design, build, and operate resilient, scalable systems across a stack spanning multiple clouds and services

- Independently drive projects — spot high-impact gap

Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
  • 6+ years of industry experience designing, building, and operating large-scale backend services in production
  • Strong programming and algorithmic skills, with proficiency in a major language (Go or similar)
  • Strong command of concurrency and correctness — reasoning about and preventing race conditions
  • Hands-on experience with distributed data stores (DynamoDB, Cosmos, Spanner, Cassandra, or similar)
  • Experience with at least one major cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
  • Observability and operational excellence — SLOs, on-call, incident response, and postmortems
  • High ownership and drive — self-managed execution with velocity in a fast-paced platform team
  • Strong engineering practices — code review, testing, documentation, and clear written and verbal communication
Preferred technical and professional experience
  • Familiarity with Kubernetes operators and controller patterns
  • Event streaming experience — Kafka, event ordering, idempotency, and at-least/exactly-once delivery

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

Must have the ability to work in Canada without sponsorship.

This role will involve working with technology that is covered by Export Regulations sanctions. If you are a Foreign National from any of the following US sanctioned countries (Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and the Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia regions of Ukraine) on a work permit, you are not eligible for employment in this position.

See more open positions at IBM