Senior Software Engineer - Confluent Cloud Infrastructure & Platform

IBM

IBM

Software Engineering, Other Engineering

California, USA · Texas City, TX, USA

Posted on Jun 2, 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

Backend engineers at Confluent build the cloud services and systems that power our data streaming platform. You’ll work on large-scale, distributed backend systems that need to be highly available, reliable, and easy to operate.

This is a general backend role used across multiple product and platform teams. Depending on your background and interests, you may work on areas such as core platform services, governance and metadata, observability and telemetry, security and access, or customer-facing application experiences. We’ll align you to a team during the hiring process based on your skills and what excites you.

You’ll partner closely with other engineers, product managers, and designers to ship features end to end — from design and implementation to rollout and ongoing operation in production.

What You Will Do

  • Design, build, and operate backend services that are secure, reliable, and scalable in a cloud-native environment.

  • Own features and projects end to end: requirements, design, implementation, testing, rollout, and ongoing improvements.

  • Work with distributed systems and microservices, with a focus on performance, resiliency, and clear API contracts.

  • Contribute to service reliability and operations, including monitoring, alerting, and on-call participation where applicable.

  • Collaborate with partner teams on architecture, data modeling, and integration points across Confluent’s platform.

  • Write clean, well-tested, and well-documented code, and participate in code reviews that raise the bar for the team.

  • Help improve engineering practices, tools, and automation to make it easier and safer to ship code.

  • Contribute to a healthy team culture through clear communication, inclusive collaboration, and a willingness to learn and teach.

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

  • Experience designing, building, and supporting backend systems in production.

  • Strong programming and algorithmic skills in at least one major language (for example, Java, Go, C/C++, or Python), and the ability to learn new languages and frameworks as needed.

  • Experience with distributed systems or large-scale backend services, such as microservices, data pipelines, event-driven architectures, or high-throughput APIs.

  • Hands-on experience deploying and operating services on a public cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including knowledge of containers and orchestration tools (for example, Docker and Kubernetes).

  • Familiarity with databases and storage systems, such as relational databases, NoSQL stores, or distributed data systems, and an understanding of performance and scalability tradeoffs.

  • A focus on quality and reliability, including testing strategies, observability (metrics, logging, tracing), and incident response best practices.

  • Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively with cross-functional partners across time zones.

  • A growth mindset: you’re curious, open to feedback, and comfortable working in areas that may be new to you.

Preferred technical and professional experience

• L3 Support Engineering: Exposure to L3 support engineering practices, including designing, developing, and testing solutions to resolve complex customer-reported problems. • DevOps Engineering: Experience working with DevOps engineering principles, contributing to the automated CI/CD pipeline, and ensuring seamless integration and delivery. • Front-End Development: Exposure to front-end development technologies, designing, developing, testing, and delivering offerings using leading-edge and/or proven technologies.

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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