Staff Software Engineer - Confluent

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. Our team sits within the Developer Productivity (DevProd) organization and helps Confluent engineers safely and efficiently build, test, and operate Confluent Cloud at scale. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will set technical direction and lead high-impact, open-ended initiatives that improve developer productivity, platform reliability, and the quality and speed of software delivery. You will bring deep expertise in one or more areas, such as developer platforms, distributed systems, test infrastructure, performance engineering, or production operations, and turn that expertise into durable leverage for teams across engineering. You will identify the highest-value problems, shape a clear technical approach, and lead execution across DevProd and partner teams. This is a senior individual-contributor role: you will lead through technical judgment, influence, and mentorship, not by managing a team. Set technical direction for important DevProd capabilities. Identify high-leverage opportunities, define practical architectures and roadmaps, and align partners on trade-offs, sequencing, and measures of success.

• Lead complex, ambiguous initiatives from problem discovery through design, implementation, rollout, and ongoing operation. Break broad goals into clear milestones, surface risks and dependencies early, and keep teams aligned as plans evolve.
• Architect and evolve secure, scalable, multi-tenant internal platform services and tools that integrate with systems such as CI/CD, test infrastructure, and developer portals.
• Advance pre-production and performance-testing capabilities. Improve workload modeling, scale and regression testing, automation, and self-service reporting so engineering teams can detect and address performance or reliability issues earlier.
• Improve the reliability, performance, scalability, and operational excellence of critical DevProd systems. Establish sound observability and operational practices, lead complex investigations and post-incident learning, and automate recurring manual work and toil.
• Simplify complex systems and workflows. Identify technical debt and friction that slow engineering teams down, then drive solutions that improve maintainability, developer experience, and long-term delivery speed.
• Influence technical decisions across teams through clear design documents, reviews, and concise written and verbal communication. Explain options and trade-offs so stakeholders can make timely, well-informed decisions.
• Raise the technical bar across DevProd and partner teams through thoughtful architecture and code reviews, reusable patterns, mentoring, and onboarding that help other engineers succeed.
• Where it can deliver measurable value, guide the safe evaluation and adoption of AI-assisted developer workflows. Use evidence to decide what to productionize, and build in appropriate guardrails, observability, and feedback mechanisms.
• Partner with engineering and other cross-functional stakeholders to connect platform investments to business and developer needs, and communicate the outcomes and impact of the work. Technical depth: Extensive experience designing, building, and operating cloud services, developer platforms, test infrastructure, or large-scale distributed systems. Deep expertise in at least one relevant technical area, with the ability to apply that expertise to unfamiliar problems.
• Architecture and judgment: A track record of architecting complex systems end to end; making pragmatic short- and long-term trade-offs; and simplifying designs, code, or projects without sacrificing reliability or quality.
• Staff-level impact: Demonstrated ability to identify high-leverage, open-ended problems and lead solutions that produce sustained benefits beyond an individual feature or project, including through partnership across teams.
• Execution: Experience leading technically complex initiatives from framing and design through delivery and operation, creating clarity from ambiguity, and delivering high-quality results while managing dependencies and risk.
• Operational excellence: Strong understanding of reliability, performance, scalability, observability, incident response, and continuous improvement for production or critical pre-production systems.
• Developer productivity mindset: A passion for making engineering teams more effective, with examples of reducing toil, improving workflows, or enabling other teams to build and operate software more safely and efficiently.
• Communication and influence: Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to write and review design documents, articulate technical trade-offs, build consensus, and influence stakeholders beyond your immediate team.
• Technical leadership and mentorship: Experience raising engineering quality through design and code reviews, coaching, knowledge sharing, and approaches or tools that make other engineers more successful.
• Engineering fundamentals: Proficiency in one or more languages used to build cloud and platform services (for example, Java, Go, or Python), plus familiarity with relevant cloud-native, CI/CD, container, and infrastructure-as-code technologies.
• Education and experience: A degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. These are nice-to-haves, not requirements:
• Experience with performance testing, benchmarking, workload modeling, or automated quality gates for distributed systems or multi-tenant cloud services.
• Experience building internal developer platforms or tools used by multiple engineering teams.
• Experience improving engineering delivery, reliability, or operational efficiency through automation and measurable developer-experience improvements.
• Experience evaluating or productionizing AI/ML or LLM-based capabilities for developer or platform workflows, with appropriate safeguards and instrumentation. India Software Engineering Remote Professional Bangalore, IN Bangalore (0063) IBM India Private Limited Agile Methodologies Debugging Engineering Integration Software Software Development Technical Leadership Testing Financial and Operational Combined Uniform Single Reporting Agile Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery Innovation Unit Testing Confluent Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery Pipelines