Senior Software Developer - Confluent Cloud Infrastructure & Platform

IBM
IBM

Software Engineering, Other Engineering · Full-time

tri-city, or, usa

Posted on Sep 15, 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

The Cloud Reliability team at Confluent builds the infrastructure and tooling that keeps Confluent Cloud reliable, secure, and operable at scale. This role is on the AI side of that mission: building an operations assistant that brings agentic workflows to incident investigation and troubleshooting. The system unifies information and actions from across Confluent's operational systems into an AI-enhanced experience that helps engineers find root causes faster.

We are looking for engineers with a passion for applying AI to large-scale operational problems. This role provides an opportunity to work across multiple domains, including agentic systems and tool use, large language model integration, evaluation and quality, and the distributed infrastructure that makes AI-driven operations reliable and secure.

What You Will Do:

* Design, build, and operate an AI-powered operations system that engineers across Confluent rely on for investigation and troubleshooting.
* Build the tools and integrations that let AI systems securely query operational data and act on Confluent's infrastructure.
* Develop agentic workflows and reasoning loops, and improve their accuracy, latency, and reliability over time.
* Build evaluation frameworks and feedback loops to measure and continuously improve the quality of AI-generated investigations..
* Strengthen the security and access model around AI-driven operations, including least-privilege access and comprehensive auditing.
* Partner with cross-functional engineering teams to turn operational expertise into automated, AI-assisted workflows.

Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise

* Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building and operating production systems.
* Proficiency in Python
* Experience integrating large language models into real applications
* A practical, product-minded approach to ambiguous problems and the ability to iterate quickly.
* A self-starter with strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work in a fast-paced environment.

Preferred technical and professional experience

* Experience building agentic systems, LLM tool use, or retrieval-augmented applications.
* Familiarity with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) or similar tool-integration frameworks.
* Experience designing evaluation and quality measurement for AI systems.
* A background in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (Kubernetes), or operational tooling.
* Experience with security and access control for systems that act on production infrastructure.

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.

The salary range for the position is based on a full-time schedule. Your ultimate salary within this range may vary depending on your job-related skills and experience for this position.

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