Senior Software Developer/Architect

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.

IBM Confluent is pioneering a fundamentally new category of data infrastructure focused on data in motion. At IBM Confluent, we’re building the foundational platform for this new paradigm of data infrastructure. Our cloud-native offering is designed to be the intelligent connective tissue enabling real-time data, from multiple sources, to constantly stream across the organization.

We’re looking for self-motivated team members who crave a challenge and feel energized to roll up their sleeves and help realize Confluent’s enormous potential. The next big goal for IBM Confluent is to make it as easy as possible for anyone to use Confluent’s products, including Kafka, to build their next killer streaming application. We are at the beginning of this journey and are looking for great engineers to come join our world-class team that is passionate about building and running large-scale, multi-tenant distributed systems for customers that expect a very high level of availability.

Backend Developers/architects at IBM/Confluent work on a set of diverse and complex challenges such as building foundational cloud frameworks and services that power all components of the platform in the Cloud. As a senior software engineer, you think strategically and you help drive end-to-end technical delivery from customer experience to scaling internal operations. You worry about key operational aspects (availability, reliability, performance, monitoring, emergency response, capacity planning, disaster recovery) of our new Compute Platform, and you make sure that we have a highly available, resilient and secure offering that our largest customers can rely on.

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.

Preferred Education: Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise:

• 7+ years industry experience designing, building, and supporting backend systems in production with a solid grasp on good software engineering practices such as code reviews, deep focus on quality, and documentation.
• Strong knowledge of Python runtime environments (virtual environments, package management, and interpreter configurations).
• Strong programming and algorithmic skills.
• Proficiency in a major programming language, e.g. Python, Go, C / C++, Java, etc.
• Strong experience running services in a public cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including containers and orchestration (for example, Docker, Kubernetes) and modern cloud native technologies.
• Expertise in other Language Runtimes / VMs (JVM/WASM, etc.) a big plus.
• A track record of technical leadership: driving projects, influencing architecture, and coordinating work across multiple engineers or teams.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to align stakeholders, explain complex ideas clearly, and drive decisions.
• Experience with observability and operational excellence (metrics, logging, tracing, incident response, and postmortems).
• BS, MS, or PhD in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience:

• Proven track record of leading the delivery of large-scale, highly available, low latency, high quality systems.
• Deep hands-on technical expertise in large scale systems engineering, distributed systems, and any of the container sandboxing technologies.
• On-call experience handling critical systems.