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 Product & Team

Kafka Connect is the foundational streaming integration framework for Apache Kafka. It enables reliable, scalable data movement between Kafka and a broad ecosystem of databases, cloud services, and storage systems.

Designed for mission-critical production environments, Kafka Connect provides a highly configurable, distributed, and fault-tolerant architecture that supports high-volume data pipelines across hybrid and cloud-native deployments.

As a strategic component of the Confluent Cloud platform, our team develops the extensible engine that transforms and routes data streams at scale, powering the infrastructure our customers depend on for their most critical data workflows.

What You'll Do

Design, build, and operationalize high-performance, scalable, and resilient distributed systems for the Kafka Connect platform.
Independently own the end-to-end execution of complex technical projects, ensuring high-quality delivery in production environments.
Solve challenging problems in the stream processing space by leveraging cloud and on-premises infrastructure to improve the performance, scalability, and elasticity of Kafka Connect connectors.
Engage with the open-source community, providing technical guidance and thought leadership.
Promote a culture of engineering excellence through clear communication, high-quality execution, and effective collaboration.

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

Who You Are

An empathetic and collaborative team player.
A self-starter who thrives in a fast-paced software development environment.
Someone with a strong sense of ownership and commitment to team and company success.
5 to 10 years of experience in backend software engineering.
Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development.
Experience building and operating large-scale production services in public cloud environments (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
Solid understanding of relational and/or non-relational databases.
Strong knowledge of systems operations, including networking, operating systems, and infrastructure.
Proficiency in Java, Go, or C/C++, with experience using Kubernetes and Terraform.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively across teams.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

Experience contributing to open-source projects.
Hands-on experience developing with or operating Apache Kafka.
Familiarity with large-scale data streaming architectures and distributed data systems.

Senior Software Engineer II - Confluent