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

About the Role

With Confluent, organizations can harness the full power of continuously flowing data to innovate and win in the modern digital world. We have a purpose that drives us to do better everyday – we're creating an entirely new category within data infrastructure - data streaming. This technology will allow every organisation to create experiences and use the power of data in ways that profoundly impact the way we all live. This impact is our purpose and drives us to do better every day.

One Confluent. One team. One Data Streaming Platform.

Data Connects Us.

Your Role and Responsibilities*

About The Role

The Logging Platform team builds and operates petabyte-scale log infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud's observability and compliance story . Our platform spans several critical domains: a high-performance log ingestion and search stack, an elastic log delivery pipeline, and a high-trust high-reliability Audit Logging/Access Transparency platform. These systems process billions of events daily across multiple CSPs.

This is a unique domain bringing together the scale and challenges of a distributed system, application layers and platform layers. This domain helps establish Observability as a key pillar for Confluent's long term success and a reason for customers to buy Confluent over competition.

Challenges In This Domain

Near real-time ingestion and delivery of logs via multiple search technologies at world's largest scale
Managing a high reliability and security first Audit logging and Access Transparency pipeline
Enabling log delivery to end customer through a unified logging platform
Enforce data sovereignty and compliance requirements

As a Senior Software Engineer II, you will independently own and drive the team's most complex technical challenges — from ambiguous problem statement through cross-functional alignment to production. You will serve as a technical anchor, raising the quality bar through design and code reviews, mentoring junior engineers, and proactively improving system reliability and operational posture.

What You Will Do

Independently lead design, implementation, and operationalization of complex, multi-quarter initiatives end to end
Architect and build mission-critical backend services with a relentless focus on performance, reliability, scalability, and security at cloud scale
Drive improvements to the platform's operational posture — reducing toil, improving observability, and strengthening on-call ergonomics
Mentor junior engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on pairing
Translate ambiguous requirements into concrete technical plans in collaboration with Product and cross-functional engineering teams
Lead incident response and retrospectives for critical failures, proposing and driving systemic improvements

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

6+ years of software development experience in a cloud or infrastructure environment
Demonstrated ability to independently own and deliver complex systems end to end in production
Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design — consistency, fault tolerance, performance trade-offs
Experience building and operating large-scale, stateful services on public clouds (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
Proficiency in Go, Java, or another statically typed language
Experience with on-call responsibilities and operational excellence practices
Bacholers/Masters in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

Hands-on experience building or operating large-scale log pipelines or observability infrastructure (OpenSearch, Kafka, ClickHouse, OpenTelemetry, ELK)
Experience with stream processing systems (Kafka Streams, Flink)
Background in security-sensitive or compliance-adjacent systems — audit logging, access control, or data redaction pipelines
Track record of cross-team technical leadership: driving architectural decisions, resolving ambiguity across teams, or influencing roadmaps beyond your immediate team

Senior Software Engineer II - Confluent