Confluent - Staff Software Engineer - Kafka Reliability Lead Engineer

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

Confluent Cloud’s Kafka service powers mission-critical customer workloads and supports a business generating nearly $600M in revenue, making reliability a direct customer-trust, retention, and revenue-protection imperative. Kafka Reliability spans broker resilience, health detection, automated mitigation, fleet observability, availability SLOs, chaos testing, capacity, and operational excellence, with the current roadmap requiring cross-team work to harden Shoreline automation, improve degraded-infrastructure detection, expand self-healing recovery, stabilize performance and availability testing, and establish fleet-level observability. The breadth, ambiguity, and long-term nature of this work require Staff-level technical leadership consistent with Confluent’s expectations for driving open-ended, high-leverage initiatives across teams.

We need a Staff Engineer to own the end-to-end Kafka Reliability strategy and roadmap, align Kafka, Kora Broker, Health Check, control-plane, infrastructure, observability, operations, and incident-management partners, and convert recurring operational issues into durable product and platform improvements. This leader will drive safer self-healing workflows, actionable fleet-level metrics, automated failure-injection and zonal resilience testing, faster incident mitigation, stronger SLO performance, and reduced operational toil across K1 and K2, ultimately strengthening customer confidence in Confluent Cloud and protecting and expanding the nearly $600M revenue base as the platform scales across clouds, regions, and customer tiers.

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• Deep Expertise in Software Development: Proven experience in designing, developing, testing, and delivering software solutions using leading-edge and/or proven technologies, with a strong focus on innovation and quality.
• Proficiency in Agile Methodologies: Experience working in Agile environments, collaborating with stakeholders to understand requirements and deliver high-quality solutions that meet business needs and goals.
• Advanced Debugging Skills: Deep expertise in debugging complex software issues, designing, developing, and unit testing code fixes for customer-reported problems.
• CI/CD Pipeline Expertise: Experience contributing to automated CI/CD pipelines, ensuring seamless integration and delivery of software solutions.
• Technical Leadership: Experience in providing technical guidance and oversight, ensuring that software solutions are unit tested and meet quality standards.
  
  

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Leading-Edge Technologies: Experience with designing, developing, and delivering software solutions using leading-edge technologies, with a focus on innovation and quality.
• Advanced Agile Methodologies: Deep expertise in working in Agile environments, collaborating with stakeholders to understand requirements and deliver high-quality solutions that meet business needs and goals.