Principal Engineer I - Confluent

IBM
IBM

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Posted on Sep 3, 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

About the Role:

The charter of the Confluent Observability and Monetisation team has been continuously expanding since its inception. You will technically drive the advancements in an expanding Confluent Observability and Monetisation charter. We want to ensure the quality of our Confluent Cloud features raise the bar. You will design and build technology for this. How do we enable our cloud and hybrid customers to gain insight into the health and performance of their Confluent resources quickly and effectively, ensuring that the experience of operating Confluent is unmatched? How do we bring forth new capabilities with rock-solid reliability while growing to 10x scale and beyond? How do we enable near real-time use cases for our customers’ most challenging use cases? This means being able to handle open-ended strategy in this area. Confluent needs you to explore and experiment with new ideas that benefit customers and not merely be driven by a list of requirements to deliver.

You will be one of the leading technologists across the Confluent Observability and Monetisation organization. You will architect and design solutions and review design implementations and code. You will have the opportunity to work across the breadth and depth of technology in Confluent. Being in such engineering teams requires you to handle not only the operational and engineering excellence but also aid in development of the roadmap, evolving vision and direction for the team. Collaboration with the rest of the organization will be essential to make progress on the roadmap, support Confluent’s product initiatives, and make the vision a reality.

What You Will Do:

  • You will work with a team of engineers and architects to help evolve Confluent Observability and Monetisation features. Work closely with product management, engineering leadership, and other key stakeholders across various teams in Confluent to build and drive the overall roadmap. Need you to be a strong tech voice outside Confluent Observability and Monetisation within Confluent.
  • Influence the overall domain health and operational hygiene for Confluent Observability. We need a tech champion for the observability capabilities we provide to our customers. You are expected to review designs and code and improve our technical standards.
  • We are looking at you to lead the technology charter for our observability and monetisation features in Confluent Cloud and in hybrid scenarios with Confluent Platform.
  • Mentor a team of high-performing engineers and leads, helping them to continue in growing their skill set through hands-on experience and mentorship.
  • Be a strong technical leader and representative for engineering teams in India.
  • Provide timely and productive feedback, encourage a growth mindset, and advise team members in setting and working toward personal development goals.
  • Nurture a culture of excellence on the team through a focus on hiring, communication, execution, and work quality.
  • Create and manage processes that enable the team to do its best work.
Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
  • Minimum of 15+ years of hands-on software development experience with the ability to anticipate future technical needs for the product and craft plans to realize them.
  • Taking ideas to production is something we look for.
  • Ready to roll up your sleeves - code, debug, design - do whatever it takes to ship the product to production.
  • Experience building and operating large-scale systems. Solid understanding of basic systems operations (disk, network, operating systems, etc). Experience running production services in the cloud.
  • Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development. Solid fundamentals in concurrent and multi-threading programming.
  • A self starter with the ability to work effectively in teams. Proactively identifying the symptoms of technical issues and reason about their causes is needed. This will be followed by fixing the root causes.
  • Timely shipping of deliverables; being able to trade-off short term technical decisions with the long term. Move fast, build in increments, and iterate. A sense of urgency, a mindset towards achieving results, and excellent prioritization skills.
  • Ability to influence the team, peers and upper management in technology decisions using effective communication and collaborative techniques
  • Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent experience. Understanding of various technologies, programming paradigms and frameworks is needed. Ability to be pragmatic and trade off their usage in production is essential.
  • Ability to take on intense customer production issues on-call; debugging and mitigating them will be needed. This requires patient log and metrics analysis with solid reasoning to nail the issue.
Preferred technical and professional experience

● Experience in designing and developing effective solutions for systems observability problems, including effective enablement of metrics, logging, events, or traces capabilities.

● Experience in designing and developing billing and monetization pipelines tailored for cloud-scale systems, including a solid grasp of metering and rate cards.

● Experience using and operating Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Apache Druid, and OpenSearch is a big plus.

● Interest in evangelism (giving talks at tech conferences, writing blog posts evangelizing Kafka).

● Experience working on stream processing technology or query processing systems.

Years of Experience:
15 - 20

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

When applying to jobs of your interest, we recommend that you do so for those that match your experience and expertise. Our recruiters advise that you apply to not more than 3 roles in a year for the best candidate experience. For additional information about location requirements, please discuss with the recruiter following submission of your application.

See more open positions at IBM