Confluent - Staff Security Engineer I - Detection & Response

IBM
IBM

Richland, WA, USA · Tokyo, Japan · Kennewick, WA, USA · Pasco, WA, USA · West Richland, WA, USA

Posted on Aug 21, 2026
Introduction

At Confluent, we’re creating a category that transforms how every company manages and streams data. Have you ever found a new favorite series on Netflix, picked up groceries curbside at Walmart, or paid for something using Square? That’s Confluent in action—giving our customers instant access to massive amounts of real-time data, enabling them to thrive in an ever-changing digital world. As one of the fastest-growing enterprise companies in history, and with Fortune 100 customers across major industries, we have a tremendous opportunity in front of us. We also have experience on our side. Our leaders have taken companies of our size to major success before and include some of the original creators of Apache Kafka®.

We’re looking for self-motivated team members who crave a challenge and feel energized to roll up their sleeves and help realize Confluent’s unlimited potential. Chart your own path and take healthy risks with the backing and support of our #OneTeam culture. Be part of inclusive initiatives like Employee Resource Groups and development programs, and take advantage of benefits that support our diverse global teams. Grow as we grow—whether you’re just starting out or managing a large team, you’ll be amazed at the magnitude of your impact.

Your role and responsibilities

We are looking for an experienced security engineer to join our infrastructure security engineering team with a focus on Detection and Response. You will have a unique opportunity to leverage your threat detection and response experience and build some of the foundational systems and services to keep our infrastructure free from malicious actors and threats.

As an expert in your domain, you will be identifying high-leverage problems and driving open-ended projects. You will partner closely with engineering teams and compliance analysts to ensure that we maintain sufficient visibility into our environments and develop effective programs and practices to ensure that our environments are always secure. Tooling and automation will be key to success as we scale our environments to meet customer demand. In addition to being a highly productive engineer, you will serve as a technical compass and mentor the next generation of security engineers.

We intend to be the world's best, fastest, and most complete stream processing service built by an excellent team, all while having fun - come join us on the journey!

What You Will Do
  • Architect, build and maintain scalable cloud-based security monitoring solutions, across logging pipelines, ETL jobs, and SIEM ingestion.
  • Drive the long-term roadmap for threat hunting by translating modern adversary tradecraft (TTPs) and threat models into high-signal detection strategies to ensure our critical infrastructure operates safely.
  • Build processes and workflows to triage security alerts and drive incidents to closure, including participating in a shared on-call rotation for incident response.
  • Research new threat attack vectors and ensure that our detection and response program is in line with the current threat landscape.
  • Proactively improve the quality of our detection rules by defining and tracking key metrics (e.g., coverage, precision, MTTD), working directly with engineering teams to eliminate classes of issues.
  • Collaborate with engineering teams in building logging pipelines needed to gather relevant security telemetry, ensuring new infrastructure ships with secure-by-default visibility.
  • Contribute to strategy, risk management and prioritization for all efforts around detection and response.
  • Provide technical guidance, mentorship, and leadership to other engineers, raising the bar for security operations across the organization.
Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
  • 8+ years of relevant industry experience in detection and response or similar security engineering role in a cloud-first environment.
  • Deep, expert-level domain knowledge in detection engineering and security incident response.
  • Experience in instrumenting telemetry and building high-quality detections in large-scale, heterogeneous deployments (e.g., Kubernetes, containers, multi-cloud).
  • Proficient ability in writing code using Python or Golang to design complex tooling, automation, and data pipelines.
  • Demonstrated experience with effective incident response and containment practices, preferably in a cloud-first environment.
  • Experience with operating open-source and/or commercial solutions for logging and security event management (e.g. SIEM, log aggregation, SOAR, etc).
  • Ability to work alongside a remote team, using a data-driven mindset to propose and own engineering decisions, and the capability to drive consensus across ambiguous, organizational-wide challenges.
Preferred technical and professional experience
  • Familiarity with more than one cloud vendor (AWS, GCP, Azure) is a plus.

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.