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. With Confluent, data doesn't sit still. We put information in motion, streaming in near real time so organizations can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them.

Your Role And Responsibilities

About the Role:

Confluent Cloud processes millions of events per second across AWS, GCP, and Azure. When incidents happen in a multi-cloud streaming platform, they happen at scale—data in motion, exactly-once semantics, and cascading failure modes that require deep systems thinking. We need an expert-level engineer who can drive proactive reliability improvements that prevent these incidents before they occur.

This role combines hands-on technical work with strategic program ownership. You'll spend roughly 75% of your time on engineering: building automation, improving tooling, analyzing systemic failure patterns, and designing reliability improvements. The remaining 25% is teaching and coordination: coaching teams through post-mortems, training incident commanders, and evolving our incident response practices.

You'll be part of a global team with follow-the-sun coverage, with clean handoffs that keep everyone working sustainable hours. Confluent has 800-1000 engineers across highly autonomous teams. This role sits within Cloud Architecture and Reliability - Supportability (CAR-S), a horizontal team that owns reliability standards and tooling across engineering. You're the person who makes us need incident management less.

What You Will Do

Proactive Reliability Engineering (75% of role)
Analyze systemic failure patterns and design improvements that prevent incident recurrence
Define and maintain SLO/SLA frameworks; use error budgets to guide reliability investments
Build tooling and automation to reduce incident response toil and scale team impact
Own Rootly configuration, workflows, and integrations with PagerDuty, Jira, Confluence, and Slack
Analyze reliability data to identify systemic improvements; build dashboards that drive action
Explore AI-assisted approaches to documentation quality and incident analysis
Design scalable reliability standards that reduce reactive workload over time.
Incident Management Program (25% of role)
Own standards, practices, and continuous improvement of incident response
Serve as an on-call Incident Commander for production incidents, including acting as escalation IC when incidents exceed a team's management chain
Develop and deliver training programs for engineering teams at all levels
Coach teams through post-mortems and on developing actionable corrective actions
Customer Root Cause Analysis (CRCA)
Edit and review customer-facing incident documents to ensure quality and clarity
Drive turnaround SLAs while maintaining technical accuracy
Ensure clear explanation of what happened, why, and how we'll prevent recurrence
Cross-Team Leadership
Partner with engineering leaders to elevate reliability practices
Be the expert who teams proactively engage for guidance

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

10+ years in SRE, incident management, or reliability engineering
Cloud experience with at least one of AWS, GCP, or Azure·
Deep expertise with incident management tooling (Rootly, PagerDuty, or similar platforms)
Strong understanding of distributed systems and failure modes at scale—Kafka/event streaming expertise preferred, or demonstrated rapid mastery of complex systems
Deep experience with observability: metrics, logging, tracing—ability to diagnose complex issues
Kubernetes and container orchestration experience
Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and release processes
Systems thinking: understanding how infrastructure design choices affect failure modes and recovery
Familiarity with SLO/SLA frameworks.
Track record as a trusted advisor across engineering organizations
Experience driving org-wide process and cultural changes
Strong written communication (design docs, one-pagers, runbooks)
Post-mortem facilitation experience
Experience with async collaboration across time zones
Large company experience navigating reliability/incident programs at 500+ engineer organizations·

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

Multi-cloud experience (minimum 2+ of AWS/GCP/Azure).
Modern CI/CD, GitHub, AI-assisted workflows—you'll have the freedom to build what you need.

Staff Site Reliability Engineer - Confluent Cloud Infrastructure