Job Description

Introduction

At Confluent, an IBM Company, we are pioneering a fundamentally new category of data infrastructure focused on data streaming. Our cloud-native offering is designed to connect and process data in real time across every application, database, and data system—creating a new foundation for modern architectures. We believe our best work comes from diverse perspectives, authentic collaboration, and a shared commitment to earning our customers love. We operate as One Team, working across functions, assuming positive intent, and optimizing for the success of Confluent as a whole. We're committed to building an inclusive environment where everyone can do their best work and grow.

Your Role And Responsibilities

Design, implement, test, and maintain Kafka client features for supported non-Java languages.
Independently deliver well-defined components of larger features with high quality and predictable execution.
Develop production-quality code with strong testing, logging, error handling, compatibility, and maintainability.
Build expertise in the architecture and operation of Kafka protocol.
Contribute to design documents, One Pagers, KIPs, technical proposals, and implementation plans.
Review pull requests and provide constructive feedback on correctness, performance, API design, testing, and operability.
Investigate and resolve complex client issues involving reliability, performance, protocol behavior, connectivity, and failure handling.
Collaborate effectively with Kafka core, cloud, platform, support, documentation, and other engineering teams to unblock delivery.
Participate in production operations and on-call responsibilities, using established runbooks and processes to diagnose and mitigate incidents.
Improve client observability, test coverage, developer experience, documentation, and operational readiness.
Help teammates solve technical problems and share knowledge within the team.
Participate in the interview process after calibration and contribute to maintaining a strong engineering hiring bar.

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

Strong proficiency in Rust
Medium proficiency in C/C++, Go, Python, or .NET, with the ability to learn and contribute across language bindings.
Strong software-engineering fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, concurrency, networking, memory management, and API design.
Ability to write production-quality code with comprehensive testing, logging, error handling, observability, and backward compatibility.
Experience diagnosing performance, latency, resource utilization, and reliability issues through profiling, metrics, logs, and debugging.
Familiarity with Linux-based production environments, release processes, operational tooling, and runbook-driven incident response.
Ability to understand and contribute to system architecture, technical proposals, One Pagers, KIPs, and code reviews.
Experience collaborating across teams and independently delivering well-defined components of larger technical projects.

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

Understanding of Kafka fundamentals: topics, partitions, producers, consumers, consumer groups, offsets, rebalancing, delivery semantics, transactions, and security.
Experience designing and implementing reliable client libraries or distributed systems.