Senior Software Engineer II - Confluent Cloud Platform

IBM

IBM

Software Engineering

California, USA · Texas City, TX, USA

Posted on May 21, 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

We’re not just building better tech. We’re rewriting how data moves and what the world can do with it. With Confluent, data doesn’t sit still. Our platform puts information in motion, streaming in near real-time so companies can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them.

It takes a certain kind of person to join this team. Those who ask hard questions, give honest feedback, and show up for each other. No egos, no solo acts. Just smart, curious humans pushing toward something bigger, together.

Senior Software Engineers II at Confluent take ownership of critical backend systems that underpin our data streaming platform. You’ll lead the design and delivery of large-scale, distributed services that must be secure, highly available, and easy to operate across regions and clouds.

This is a general L4 backend role used across multiple teams. Depending on your background, you may focus on areas like core platform services, governance and metadata, observability and telemetry, security and access, or customer-facing application services. We’ll align you to a team during the process based on your experience, interests, and business needs.

You’ll act as a technical leader: setting direction for projects, making architecture decisions, mentoring engineers, and partnering with cross-functional stakeholders to ship high-impact work.

What You Will Do

  • Own and lead the design and implementation of complex backend services and systems in a cloud-native, microservices-based environment.

  • Make architecture and technical decisions that balance reliability, scalability, performance, and operability, and clearly communicate the tradeoffs.

  • Drive projects end to end: from requirements and design through implementation, rollout, and ongoing operation in production.

  • Improve service reliability and operations by defining SLOs/SLAs, strengthening observability, and participating in on-call as needed.

  • Collaborate across teams to define APIs, integration points, and data models that keep the platform coherent and evolvable.

  • Identify and drive platform and productivity improvements (tooling, automation, process) that raise the bar for the broader engineering organization.

  • Mentor and support other engineers through code reviews, design reviews, and technical guidance, helping grow the team’s capabilities.

  • Contribute to a culture of continuous improvement, inclusive collaboration, and high technical standards.

  • A track record of technical leadership: driving projects, influencing architecture, and coordinating work across multiple engineers or teams.

  • Experience with observability and operational excellence (metrics, logging, tracing, incident response, and postmortems).

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

  • 7+ years of industry experience building, scaling, and operating backend systems in production.

  • Deep proficiency in at least one major backend programming language (for example, Java, Go, C/C++, or Python) and strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and system design.

  • Hands-on experience with distributed systems (such as event-driven architectures, high-throughput services, or large-scale data pipelines) and an understanding of consistency, fault tolerance, and performance tradeoffs.

  • Strong experience running services in a public cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including containers and orchestration (for example, Docker, Kubernetes) and modern deployment practices.

  • Comfortable working with databases and storage systems (SQL and/or NoSQL), including data modeling and performance optimization for scale.

Preferred technical and professional experience

  • Experience building or operating mission-critical, multi-tenant, or multi-region services with strict availability and latency requirements.

  • Familiarity with data streaming technologies such as Apache Kafka, Flink, or similar systems.

  • Previous work in security, governance, or compliance-sensitive backend domains.

  • Demonstrated impact beyond your immediate team, such as cross-org initiatives, technical vision, or platform investments.

  • Contributions to open source, technical writing, or speaking that show depth in backend or distributed systems.

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.

See more open positions at IBM