[Confluent] Senior Technical Program Manager

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. With Confluent, data doesn’t sit still. We put information in motion, streaming in near real time so organizations can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them.

Your Role And Responsibilities

As a Senior Technical Program Manager (TPM), your day-to-day responsibilities will involve coordinating multiple Kafka initiatives across numerous teams, stakeholder groups (including Product, Security, and others), and geographies. You will monitor dependencies across organizations while driving planning, prioritization, risk management, stakeholder communications, operational execution, and technical trade-off discussions.

A cross-organizational perspective is critical for managing horizontal, multi-quarter initiatives focused on cost optimization, margin improvement, and security-related programs.

Driving these initiatives requires experience managing cloud-based projects, a strong operational mindset, expertise in cross-team dependency management, and the ability to dive into technical challenges and organizational problem-solving. A key aspect of the role is shielding development teams from unnecessary disruption and creating the structure needed for predictable, on-schedule delivery of long-term programs.

Programs may include complex technical initiatives focused on improving performance, scalability, multi-region disaster recovery, and other cloud infrastructure capabilities. As a result, strong cloud fundamentals are essential to effectively engage in technical discussions and support successful program execution.

Who You Are

• Smart, humble, and empathetic.
• A strong team player who puts the success of the team and company first.
• Motivated by the challenges of a fast-paced, innovative software environment with a "get stuff done" mentality.
  
  

Responsibilities

• Partner with stakeholders to drive cross-functional and business-critical initiatives.
• Ensure successful project delivery through proactive communication of progress, risks, and status to key stakeholders.
• Identify and resolve roadblocks and challenges that could impact project outcomes.
• Support technical decision-making to keep projects moving forward efficiently.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, and Security leadership to streamline execution and maintain predictable delivery schedules.
• Lead cross-functional meetings and facilitate decisions related to schedules, bug triage, and internal and external customer deliverables.
• Drive end-to-end execution by partnering with engineering and product stakeholders, identifying risks, managing dependencies, and aligning competing priorities.
• Help Kafka teams understand the priorities and dependencies of upstream and downstream partner teams to unblock roadmap execution and accelerate delivery.
  
  

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• Minimum of 4 years of Technical Program Management experience, with a proven track record of driving the end-to-end lifecycle of large, complex, cross-functional programs.
• Experience with JIRA, BigQuery, and Google Apps Script.
• Strong technical foundation, particularly in cloud networking and cloud infrastructure fundamentals.
• Excellent analytical skills, with the ability to leverage data to identify insights, trends, and opportunities that help engineering teams make informed decisions.
• Experience leading cross-functional cloud platform engineering initiatives is highly desirable.
• Experience driving operational excellence across teams and developing dashboards and reporting solutions is a strong plus.
• Strong communication, interpersonal, and leadership skills, with the ability to effectively partner with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience working in highly agile environments, including the use of JIRA reporting, sprint planning, and program tracking, is preferred.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
  
  

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Familiarity with the Confluent Platform or Apache Kafka.
• Experience building dashboards and reports using JQL, SQL, BigQuery, or Data Studio.
• Background working with or within an SRE (Site Reliability Engineering), Platform Engineering, or Infrastructure organization.