Staff Software Engineer II - Confluent

IBM
IBM

Software Engineering

Kraków, Poland

Posted on Aug 28, 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.

Your role and responsibilities

Your role and responsibilities
We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer with strong Rust experience to work on complex backend, infrastructure and distributed systems. In this role, you will work closely with senior engineers and technical leaders to design and build highly scalable, reliable and high-performance software. You will contribute to architectural decisions, drive technical improvements and help evolve systems across multiple components.
The role requires strong experience with Rust programming, distributed systems and large-scale software engineering. Experience with Apache Kafka, streaming, messaging or similar infrastructure technologies is highly valuable, but is not required if you have a strong background in complex systems engineering.

What You Will Do:
As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be a technical leader whose work significantly impacts the product, engineering organization, and customer success.
  • Drive complex technical projects that require strong software engineering skills, architectural judgement and the ability to work effectively with ambiguity.
  • Design and develop high-performance systems in Rust, focusing on scalability, reliability, maintainability and operational excellence.
  • Provide technical leadership across teams, set technical direction and influence architecture and engineering decisions.
  • Be a force multiplier by mentoring senior engineers and helping the team improve engineering practices, design principles and software architecture.
  • Insist on high standards for software quality, performance, reliability and maintainability.
  • Collaborate across teams with engineering, product management and other stakeholders to understand requirements and translate them into robust technical solutions.
  • Drive operational excellence through reliability improvements, performance optimization, observability and supportability.
  • Contribute to technical design and architecture discussions, clearly communicating complex technical concepts and trade-offs.
  • Contribute to open source projects and communities where relevant, including Apache Kafka or other distributed systems projects.
Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
Experience:
  • Strong professional experience developing production software using Rust.
  • Track record of delivering complex systems projects with large scope, including multi-quarter design and development initiatives.
  • Strong experience with distributed systems, backend infrastructure, cloud platforms, networking, storage, databases or other large-scale systems.
  • 4+ years driving Staff-level or equivalent technical initiatives across multiple teams, systems or components.
  • Experience designing and implementing scalable, reliable and high-performance software systems.
  • Strong understanding of software architecture, system design and engineering best practices.
Leadership & Influence:
  • Demonstrated ability to lead through ambiguity, set technical direction and align multiple teams around complex technical plans.
  • Track record of mentoring senior engineers and enabling others to deliver on high-risk, high-impact projects.
  • Clear, concise technical communication, both written and verbal.
  • Ability to influence technical decisions beyond your immediate team and drive engineering standards across the organization.
Preferred technical and professional experience
  • Experience with Apache Kafka, streaming platforms, messaging systems or other distributed data systems.
  • Prior experience contributing to open source projects, particularly systems software or infrastructure projects.
  • Experience with cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, networking, storage or database technologies.
  • Experience with performance optimization, observability, reliability engineering and large-scale production systems.
  • Prior experience as a committer, maintainer or core contributor to an open source project.

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

For additional information about location requirements, please discuss with the recruiter following submission of your application.

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 and experience. 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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