Senior Software Engineer II - Confluent

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.

About the Role

With Confluent, organizations can harness the full power of continuously flowing data to innovate and win in the modern digital world. We have a purpose that drives us to do better everyday – we're creating an entirely new category within data infrastructure - data streaming. This technology will allow every organisation to create experiences and use the power of data in ways that profoundly impact the way we all live. This impact is our purpose and drives us to do better every day.

One Confluent. One team. One Data Streaming Platform.

Data Connects Us.

Your Role and Responsibilities*

About the Role: 

The Logging Platform team builds and operates petabyte-scale log infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud's observability and compliance story . Our platform spans several critical domains: a high-performance log ingestion and search stack, an elastic log delivery pipeline, and a high-trust high-reliability Audit Logging/Access Transparency platform. These systems process billions of events daily across multiple CSPs.

.This is a unique domain bringing together the scale and challenges of a distributed system, application layers and platform layers. This domain helps establish Observability as a key pillar for Confluent’s long term success and a reason for customers to buy Confluent over competition.

Challenges in this domain:

• Near real-time ingestion and  delivery of logs via multiple search technologies at world's largest scale
• Managing a high reliability and  security first Audit logging and Access Transparency pipeline
• Enabling log delivery to end customer through a unified logging platform
• Enforce data sovereignty and compliance requirements

As a Senior Software Engineer II, you will independently own and drive the team's most complex technical challenges — from ambiguous problem statement through cross-functional alignment to production. You will serve as a technical anchor, raising the quality bar through design and code reviews, mentoring junior engineers, and proactively improving system reliability and operational posture.

What You Will Do

• Independently lead design, implementation, and operationalization of complex, multi-quarter initiatives end to end
• Architect and build mission-critical backend services with a relentless focus on performance, reliability, scalability, and security at cloud scale
• Drive improvements to the platform's operational posture — reducing toil, improving observability, and strengthening on-call ergonomics
• Mentor junior engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on pairing
• Translate ambiguous requirements into concrete technical plans in collaboration with Product and cross-functional engineering teams
• Lead incident response and retrospectives for critical failures, proposing and driving systemic improvements

• 6+ years of software development experience in a cloud or infrastructure environment
• Demonstrated ability to independently own and deliver complex systems end to end in production
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design — consistency, fault tolerance, performance trade-offs
• Experience building and operating large-scale, stateful services on public clouds (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Proficiency in Go, Java, or another statically typed language
• Experience with on-call responsibilities and operational excellence practices
• Bacholers/Masters in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience

- Hands-on experience building or operating large-scale log pipelines or observability infrastructure (OpenSearch, Kafka, ClickHouse, OpenTelemetry, ELK)

- Experience with stream processing systems (Kafka Streams, Flink)

- Background in security-sensitive or compliance-adjacent systems — audit logging, access control, or data redaction pipelines

- Track record of cross-team technical leadership: driving architectural decisions, resolving ambiguity across teams, or influencing roadmaps beyond your immediate team

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.

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Are you ready to be an IBMer?

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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.

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