Senior 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

• Own the execution and delivery of projects within a ksqlDB product
• Build strong, subdomain-level expertise (pull queries, state stores, elastic scaling, SQL language, etc.) and confidently field questions from partners/stakeholders in that area.
• Contribute meaningful input in design discussions; demonstrate technical leadership by reviewing others' work and suggesting architectural improvements.
• Ship features and fixes with the customer in mind; proactively flag and pursue improvements to how ksqlDB serves streaming-SQL use cases.
• Participate in on-call/incident response - diagnose and resolve customer-impacting issues, write/maintain runbooks, and drive retrospectives that reduce operational toil.
• Contribute to team OKRs and collaborate cross-functionally (Kafka Streams, Cloud Control Plane, Product/PM) so technical work maps to business needs.
• Mentor junior/early-career engineers, actively participate in code review, and contribute to interviewing as the team scales.

Preferred Education Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• Strong Java proficiency - the ksqlDB/Kafka Streams codebase is JVM-based - with a solid grounding in data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and distributed-systems fundamentals.
• 3–6 years of professional software engineering experience building and operating backend/distributed systems in production.
• Ability to design, test (unit/integration), and debug features inside a large, established codebase, following existing architecture and code-health practices.
• Familiarity with cloud-native operations: containers/Kubernetes, observability (metrics/logs/traces), and on-call practices.

Solid written/verbal communication - clear design docs, constructive code review, cross-functional collaboration

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Prior hands-on experience with Kafka, Kafka Streams, or with competing streaming-SQL/database engines is a plus.
• Experience with distributed consensus, state management (e.g., RocksDB-backed state stores), or elastic/auto-scaling distributed systems.
• Exposure to database internals - query planning/optimization, transaction/consistency models - relevant to ksqlDB's push toward being a true streaming database (pull-query consistency guarantees).
• Experience operating a multi-tenant SaaS control plane (Confluent Cloud or similar).

Some track record of mentoring or leading small technical initiatives