Senior Software Developer II - Confluent Cloud Platform

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 We’re not just building better tech. We’re rewriting how data moves and what the world can do with it. With Confluent, data doesn’t sit still. Our platform puts information in motion, streaming in near real-time so companies can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them.

It takes a certain kind of person to join this team. Those who ask hard questions, give honest feedback, and show up for each other. No egos, no solo acts. Just smart, curious humans pushing toward something bigger, together.

Senior Software Engineers II at Confluent take ownership of critical backend systems that underpin our data streaming platform. You’ll lead the design and delivery of large-scale, distributed services that must be secure, highly available, and easy to operate across regions and clouds.

The team owns a highly available, scalable metadata store — the source of truth that services across Confluent Cloud build on. It serves low-latency read and write APIs, and streams data in real time. The platform is a foundational backbone of a broader effort to re-architect Confluent Cloud and replacing bespoke, per-team datastores with a single self-serve platform.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve the metadata platform — the read, write, and streaming APIs
• Solve hard distributed-systems problems — availability, consistency, sharding, scaling
• Design, build, and operate resilient, scalable systems across a stack spanning multiple clouds and services
• Independently drive projects — spot high-impact gap

Preferred Education Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• 6+ years of industry experience designing, building, and operating large-scale backend services in production
• Strong programming and algorithmic skills, with proficiency in a major language (Go or similar)
• Strong command of concurrency and correctness — reasoning about and preventing race conditions
• Hands-on experience with distributed data stores (DynamoDB, Cosmos, Spanner, Cassandra, or similar)
• Experience with at least one major cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Observability and operational excellence — SLOs, on-call, incident response, and postmortems
• High ownership and drive — self-managed execution with velocity in a fast-paced platform team
• Strong engineering practices — code review, testing, documentation, and clear written and verbal communication

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Familiarity with Kubernetes operators and controller patterns
• Event streaming experience — Kafka, event ordering, idempotency, and at-least/exactly-once delivery