Senior Software Engineer

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 Product & Team: Kafka Connect is the foundational streaming integration framework for Apache Kafka. It enables reliable, scalable data movement between Kafka and the broader ecosystem of databases, cloud services, and storage systems. Designed for mission-critical production environments, this highly configurable system provides a distributed and fault-tolerant architecture that supports high-volume data pipelines across hybrid and cloud-native deployments. As a strategic core of the Confluent Cloud platform, our team builds the extensible engine that transforms and routes data streams at scale, powering the infrastructure that our customers rely on for their most critical data workflows. 

What You’ll Do: 

● Design, build, and operationalize high-performance, scalable, and resilient distributed systems for the Kafka Connect platform. 

● Independently own the end-to-end execution of complex technical projects, ensuring high-quality delivery in production. 

● Solve complex challenges in the stream processing space using cloud and on-premises resources to improve the performance, scalability, and elasticity of Kafka Connectors. 

● Engage with the Open Source community to provide technical guidance and thought leadership. 

● Promote a culture of engineering excellence through clear communication, high-quality execution, and effective collaboration.

What We're Looking For: 

● 3 to 6 years of experience in backend engineering. 

● Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development 

● Experience in building and operating large-scale production services in public cloud environments (AWS, Azure, or GCP). 

● Solid understanding of relational or non-relational database systems and systems operations (networking, operating systems, etc.). 

● Proficiency in Java, Go, or C/C++, and experience with Kubernetes and Terraform. 

● Understanding of systems operations (databases, networking, operating systems). 

● A self-starter with the ability to work effectively in a team and excellent written and verbal communication skills. 

● Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience. 

Who you are: 

● Empathetic and collaborative team player. 

● Strong sense of ownership and commitment to team and company success. 

● Self-starter driven by the challenges of a fast-paced software environment.

● Experience in open-source development. 

● Experience using Apache Kafka.

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?

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.

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