Staff Software Engineer I - Confluent

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 charter of the Confluent Platform (CP) team has continuously expanded since its inception, and as a Staff Software Engineer I, you will set technical direction and drive major advancements across this ever-expanding charter. This role operates at the intersection of platform architecture, large-scale distributed systems, and customer-critical operations, with scope and impact spanning the entire Confluent Platform organization.

A core pillar of our strategy is Unified Stream Manager hybrid-first offerings. We are building platform capabilities that deliver a consistent, enterprise-grade management, observability, and security experience across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid deployments. You will help architect and deliver these foundational USM capabilities—enabling customers to seamlessly operate, monitor, and secure Confluent Platform deployments across multi-cloud and multi-geography environments. Your work will directly influence how enterprises run Kafka at scale in increasingly complex regulatory and operational landscapes.

Beyond USM, You Will Technically Lead Initiatives To

• Raise the quality bar of platform deliverables through strong design, architecture, and engineering rigor.
• Evolve and modernize release engineering to improve reliability, velocity, and operational confidence.
• Bring the latest innovations from the Kubernetes ecosystem into CFK, translating ecosystem progress into tangible customer value.
• Advance cluster management, observability, and security for very large CP deployments, ensuring readiness for global regulatory and data-protection requirements.
• Improve operational excellence, on-call effectiveness, and SLA adherence by building systems that are diagnosable, resilient, and automation-first.
  
  

You will be expected to own open-ended problem spaces, explore new ideas, prototype solutions, and turn the most promising approaches into production systems that materially improve customer outcomes. As one of the leading technologists across the Confluent Platform organization, you will shape platform architecture, review designs and code, influence technical direction across teams, and help define the long-term vision and roadmap for the platform.

What You Will Do

• Technically lead the evolution of the Confluent Platform, with deep ownership of USM, hybrid-first management, and platform-wide operational capabilities.
• Partner closely with product management, engineering leadership, and cross-org stakeholders (including Confluent Cloud) to define and execute the CP roadmap.
• Act as a strong external technical voice for Confluent Platform across the company.
• Champion domain health, operational hygiene, and platform reliability; raise the bar through design and code reviews.
• Lead architecture and design of large, complex systems spanning distributed systems, Kubernetes, security, and observability.
• Mentor and grow senior engineers and technical leads, providing hands-on guidance and career mentorship.
• Represent and strengthen engineering leadership in India, setting standards for execution, communication, and engineering excellence.
• Build and evolve processes that enable teams to operate at scale without sacrificing quality or velocity.
  
  

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• 10+ years of hands-on software development experience, with a proven ability to anticipate future technical needs and execute toward them.
• A strong track record of taking ideas from concept to production in complex, high-scale systems.
• Willingness to roll up your sleeves—design, code, debug, and operate critical systems.
• Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, including strong fundamentals in OS, networking, storage, and cloud infrastructure.
• Excellent grounding in distributed systems, concurrency, and multi-threaded programming.
• A proactive, self-starter mindset with strong problem-solving skills—identifying root causes and driving durable fixes.
• Ability to balance short-term execution with long-term architectural integrity; ship incrementally and iterate with urgency.
• Strong influence skills—able to drive technical decisions across teams and senior leadership through clear, data-driven communication.
• Experience handling high-severity production issues, including on-call ownership, deep debugging, and mitigation under pressure.
• BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
  
  

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Experience in open-source development
• Experience using Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Apache Spark is a big plus
• Interest in evangelism (giving talks at tech conferences, writing blog posts evangelizing Kafka)
• Experience working on stream processing technology or query processing systems
• Data processing systems in general