Confluent - Staff Software Engineer - Stream Governance

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'l have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world.

Your role and responsibilities

As a Staff Software Engineer at Confluent, you will take ownership of critical backend systems in Stream Governance products that underpin our data streaming platform. You’ll lead the design and delivery of large-scale, distributed services that must be secure, highly available, and easy to operate across regions and clouds.

The Stream Governance product portfolio is crucial to achieving Confluent’s mission to put event streaming at the heart of every organization. Our mission is to provide a robust, cloud-native platform that ensures data quality and integrity by standardizing structure and enforcing intelligent rules across every stream. You will be responsible for delivering critical functionalities like Confluent Schema Registry, Data Contracts, and Policies.

In this role, you will collaborate closely with the team and key stakeholders to design, architect, and develop cloud-native, multi-tenant services for Stream Governance. You will be responsible for guiding the vision, providing technical leadership, mentoring, and enabling a high-performing engineering team to tackle complex distributed data challenges at scale.

You’ll act as a technical leader: setting direction for projects, making architecture decisions, mentoring engineers, and partnering with cross-functional stakeholders to ship high-impact work.

What You Will Do

Develop and architect the cloud-native Stream Governance platform - a multi-tenant, highly available, and scalable service for Kafka and real-time data.

Own and lead the end-to-end design and implementation of complex backend services within a cloud-native, microservices-based environment.

Drive projects from requirements and design through implementation, rollout, and ongoing operation in production.

Make architecture and technical decisions that thoughtfully balance reliability, scalability, performance, and operability.

Solve complicated technical projects with high quality, provide specialized technical guidance to the team, and mentor/support other engineers through code reviews and design reviews.

Evaluate and enhance the efficiency of our platform's technology stack, ensuring we keep pace with industry trends and adopt state-of-the-art solutions.

Take responsibility for developing, managing, and maintaining a mission-critical service with a 99.99 SLA running across 100+ AWS, GCP, and Azure regions.

Partner across engineering and with other key stakeholders to create and execute the overall roadmap for delivering a top-notch Data Streaming Platform.

Contribute to a culture of continuous improvement, inclusive collaboration, and high technical standards.

Required technical and professional expertise

• 10+ years of industry experience designing, building, scaling, and operating backend systems in production.

• Deep proficiency in at least one major backend programming language (e.g., Java, Go, C/C++, or Python) and strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and system design.

• Hands-on experience with distributed systems, such as event-driven architectures, high-throughput services, or large-scale data pipelines. A strong understanding of consistency, fault tolerance, and performance tradeoffs.

• Strong experience running production services in a public cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including containerized workloads (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).

• Expertise in cloud-native technology, including networking & security, and experience being part of an oncall rotation.

• Proven experience in leading and mentoring technical teams.

• A track record of technical leadership: driving projects, influencing architecture, and coordinating work across multiple engineers or teams.

• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to align stakeholders, explain complex ideas clearly, and drive decisions.

• BS, MS, or PhD in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Experience building or operating mission-critical, multi-tenant, or multi-region services with strict availability and latency requirements.

• Familiarity with data streaming technologies such as Apache Kafka, Flink, or similar systems.

• Demonstrated impact beyond your immediate team, such as driving cross-org initiatives or technical vision.

• Contributions to open source, technical writing, or speaking that showcase technical depth.

IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.