[Confluent] Senior Technical Program Manager

IBM
IBM

IT, Operations

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

Posted on Aug 11, 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

As a Senior Technical Program Manager (TPM), your day-to-day responsibilities will involve coordinating multiple Kafka initiatives across numerous teams, stakeholder groups (including Product, Security, and others), and geographies. You will monitor dependencies across organizations while driving planning, prioritization, risk management, stakeholder communications, operational execution, and technical trade-off discussions.

A cross-organizational perspective is critical for managing horizontal, multi-quarter initiatives focused on cost optimization, margin improvement, and security-related programs.

Driving these initiatives requires experience managing cloud-based projects, a strong operational mindset, expertise in cross-team dependency management, and the ability to dive into technical challenges and organizational problem-solving. A key aspect of the role is shielding development teams from unnecessary disruption and creating the structure needed for predictable, on-schedule delivery of long-term programs.

Programs may include complex technical initiatives focused on improving performance, scalability, multi-region disaster recovery, and other cloud infrastructure capabilities. As a result, strong cloud fundamentals are essential to effectively engage in technical discussions and support successful program execution.

Who You Are
  • Smart, humble, and empathetic.
  • A strong team player who puts the success of the team and company first.
  • Motivated by the challenges of a fast-paced, innovative software environment with a "get stuff done" mentality.
Responsibilities
  • Partner with stakeholders to drive cross-functional and business-critical initiatives.
  • Ensure successful project delivery through proactive communication of progress, risks, and status to key stakeholders.
  • Identify and resolve roadblocks and challenges that could impact project outcomes.
  • Support technical decision-making to keep projects moving forward efficiently.
  • Partner with Engineering, Product, and Security leadership to streamline execution and maintain predictable delivery schedules.
  • Lead cross-functional meetings and facilitate decisions related to schedules, bug triage, and internal and external customer deliverables.
  • Drive end-to-end execution by partnering with engineering and product stakeholders, identifying risks, managing dependencies, and aligning competing priorities.
  • Help Kafka teams understand the priorities and dependencies of upstream and downstream partner teams to unblock roadmap execution and accelerate delivery.
Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise

  • Minimum of 4 years of Technical Program Management experience, with a proven track record of driving the end-to-end lifecycle of large, complex, cross-functional programs.

  • Experience with JIRA, BigQuery, and Google Apps Script.

  • Strong technical foundation, particularly in cloud networking and cloud infrastructure fundamentals.

  • Excellent analytical skills, with the ability to leverage data to identify insights, trends, and opportunities that help engineering teams make informed decisions.

  • Experience leading cross-functional cloud platform engineering initiatives is highly desirable.

  • Experience driving operational excellence across teams and developing dashboards and reporting solutions is a strong plus.

  • Strong communication, interpersonal, and leadership skills, with the ability to effectively partner with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

  • Experience working in highly agile environments, including the use of JIRA reporting, sprint planning, and program tracking, is preferred.

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred technical and professional experience
  • Familiarity with the Confluent Platform or Apache Kafka.
  • Experience building dashboards and reports using JQL, SQL, BigQuery, or Data Studio.
  • Background working with or within an SRE (Site Reliability Engineering), Platform Engineering, or Infrastructure organization.

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.

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.

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