Senior Software Engineer - Confluent

IBM
IBM

Software Engineering

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Posted on Sep 19, 2026
Introduction

At Confluent, an IBM Company, we are pioneering a fundamentally new category of data infrastructure focused on data streaming. Our cloud-native offering is designed to connect and process data in real time across every application, database, and data system—creating a new foundation for modern architectures. We believe our best work comes from diverse perspectives, authentic collaboration, and a shared commitment to earning our customers’ love. We operate as One Team, working across functions, assuming positive intent, and optimizing for the success of Confluent as a whole. We’re committed to building an inclusive environment where everyone can do their best work and grow.

Your role and responsibilities
  • Design, implement, test, and maintain Kafka client features for supported non-Java languages.
  • Independently deliver well-defined components of larger features with high quality and predictable execution.
  • Develop production-quality code with strong testing, logging, error handling, compatibility, and maintainability.
  • Build expertise in the architecture and operation of Kafka protocol.
  • Contribute to design documents, One Pagers, KIPs, technical proposals, and implementation plans.
  • Review pull requests and provide constructive feedback on correctness, performance, API design, testing, and operability.
  • Investigate and resolve complex client issues involving reliability, performance, protocol behavior, connectivity, and failure handling.
  • Collaborate effectively with Kafka core, cloud, platform, support, documentation, and other engineering teams to unblock delivery.
  • Participate in production operations and on-call responsibilities, using established runbooks and processes to diagnose and mitigate incidents.
  • Improve client observability, test coverage, developer experience, documentation, and operational readiness.
  • Help teammates solve technical problems and share knowledge within the team.
  • Participate in the interview process after calibration and contribute to maintaining a strong engineering hiring bar.

Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
  • Strong proficiency in Rust
  • Medium proficiency in C/C++, Go, Python, or .NET, with the ability to learn and contribute across language bindings.
  • Strong software-engineering fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, concurrency, networking, memory management, and API design.
  • Ability to write production-quality code with comprehensive testing, logging, error handling, observability, and backward compatibility.
  • Experience diagnosing performance, latency, resource utilization, and reliability issues through profiling, metrics, logs, and debugging.
  • Familiarity with Linux-based production environments, release processes, operational tooling, and runbook-driven incident response.
  • Ability to understand and contribute to system architecture, technical proposals, One Pagers, KIPs, and code reviews.
  • Experience collaborating across teams and independently delivering well-defined components of larger technical projects.
Preferred technical and professional experience
  • Understanding of Kafka fundamentals: topics, partitions, producers, consumers, consumer groups, offsets, rebalancing, delivery semantics, transactions, and security.
  • Experience designing and implementing reliable client libraries or distributed systems.
Years of Experience:
3 - 7

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