Senior Software Engineer - Confluent DevProd

IBM

IBM

Software Engineering

California, USA · Tokyo, Japan · Texas City, TX, USA

Posted on May 12, 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. With Confluent, data doesn’t sit still. We put information in motion, streaming in near real time so organizations can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them.

Your role and responsibilities

About this role:

Our team sits within the Developer Productivity (DevProd) organization and is responsible for ensuring that Confluent engineers can safely and efficiently build, test, and operate our cloud at scale. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will design, build, and operate internal platform services and tools that improve developer experience and overall engineering velocity. You’ll take ownership of meaningful projects—often with some ambiguity—partnering with senior engineers and stakeholders to shape solutions, implement them, and support them in production and critical pre‑prod environments.

This role is ideal for someone who:

  • Enjoys platform services work: multi-tenant, internal-facing services used by hundreds of engineers.

  • Cares deeply about testability, reliability, and developer experience in complex,

  • distributed systems.

  • Thrives in R&D-leaning, somewhat ambiguous spaces where you prototype, iterate, and converge on the right solution.

  • Is curious about practical AI-assisted developer workflows and comfortable learning and evaluating new tools.

  • Is highly self-driven, naturally takes initiative, and does things that are important without being asked.

What You Will Do:

  • Build and operate internal developer platform services — design secure, multi-tenant, and scalable services that integrate into existing DevProd systems (e.g., CI/CD, test infrastructure, developer portals), and own their reliability, performance, and monitoring.

  • Improve pre-production and performance testing capabilities — model realistic workloads and stress scenarios, automate performance/scale/regression tests as part of CI/CD, and provide actionable, self-service reporting that helps teams quickly see where their services break or degrade.

  • Explore and integrate AI-assisted workflows for developers — evaluate AI tools and frameworks, run data-driven experiments, and, where they add real value, productionize workflows such as triage assistants, anomaly detection over pre‑prod metrics, or intelligent test selection, with appropriate guardrails and visibility.

  • Deliver projects end to end in a collaborative way — frame problems, write clear design docs, break work into milestones, drive implementation with your peers, and participate in rollout plans that include documentation, training, and feedback loops with partner teams.

  • Contribute to team and engineering culture — participate in on-call and incident response for the components you own, write clear documentation, mentor junior engineers through design and code reviews, and help evolve best practices for DevProd and platform engineering.

This job can be performed from anywhere in the US

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

  • Education & Experience – BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related field (or equivalent experience), and at least 5 years of professional software engineering experience building and operating cloud services, platforms, or large-scale distributed systems.

  • Technical & Platform Depth – Strong fundamentals in distributed systems and reliability; proficiency in at least one statically typed language (e.g., Java, Go) plus a scripting language (e.g., Python); experience with DevProd/DevOps tooling such as CI/CD, containers, and infrastructure-as-code.

  • Execution & Ownership – Demonstrated ability to independently drive projects from design through rollout, breaking work into milestones, managing risk, and delivering high-quality outcomes on time.

  • Collaboration & Leadership – Strong written and verbal communication skills; experience mentoring other engineers, leading design and code reviews, and influencing cross-functional stakeholders in a platform setting.

  • Operational Excellence – Proven track record owning services in production or critical pre‑prod environments, including on-call, incident response, and postmortems, with a strong bias towards automation to reduce toil and improve reliability.

  • AI Awareness – Practical experience or strong interest in integrating AI/ML or LLM-based capabilities into developer or platform workflows, along with an understanding of how to design sensible guardrails and instrumentation for safe use. You don’t need to be an AI expert, but you’re comfortable evaluating and adopting new tools.

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Leading-Edge Technologies: Experience with designing, developing, and delivering software solutions using leading-edge technologies, including back-end and front-end development, and DevOps engineering. • Agile Collaboration: Experience working in an Agile environment, collaborating with stakeholders to understand requirements and deliver high-quality software solutions. • Automated CI/CD Pipelines: Experience contributing to automated CI/CD pipelines, ensuring seamless integration and delivery of software solutions.

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.

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