The posting
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.
We are looking for an engineer who wants to go deep on a real, widely deployed platform. You will join one of the CP sub-teams and take ownership of well-scoped features within that area - designing them, building them, testing them, and supporting them once they reach customers.
You will work alongside experienced engineers who will help you build depth in your subdomain, and you will be expected to become increasingly self-sufficient over time: picking up problems, reasoning through them, and delivering high-quality solutions with limited hand-holding. This is a hands-on engineering role with a clear path toward broader technical ownership.
What You Will Do
● Design, build, and operate features and tooling within your CP sub-team’s area (release engineering, readiness, deploy, security, or monitoring and management).
● Own medium-sized features end to end: design, implementation, testing, rollout, and follow-through - delivering each with high quality.
● Write clean, well-tested code with sound engineering practices around testing, logging,
and error handling.
● Contribute meaningfully to design discussions and reviews for your area, and write one-pagers or design notes for the work you own.
● Review peers’ pull requests and provide constructive, specific feedback that improves the team’s quality bar.
● Participate in CP on-call rotations, diagnosing and resolving customer-impacting issues through careful log and metrics analysis.
● Improve operational stability by automating repetitive work, reducing on-call toil, and writing and maintaining runbooks.
● Collaborate with engineers on adjacent teams to unblock yourself and land work that spans more than one component.
● Help teammates with specific technical problems and support new engineers as they ramp up.
Confluent Platform
Confluent Platform’s mission is to deliver a best-in-class, full-scale data streaming platform for any BYOI (Bring Your Own Infra) setup - from a developer’s laptop to private cloud infrastructure. Confluent is the leader in data-in-motion, and CP brings that experience to private cloud and the open-source community. CP generates roughly 50% of Confluent’s revenue.
The Team
The CP team is based out of India (established 2023) and is made up of the following sub-teams:
● Build & Release - Build the foundational infrastructure and framework for Release engineering which is highly scalable across 130+ repositories, so as to deliver Confluent Platform installable across different platforms(rpm, deb, archive, microservice deployments through docker) while adopting new technological trends to ensure compliance and security standards.
● CP Readiness - Build the right tools and frameworks to ensure developers can implement high quality code validation to ensure highly reliable deployments across Confluent, while also acting as “Customer Zero” quality gatekeepers.
● CP Deploy - Build E2E deployment frameworks and automation through Ansible, Kubernetes/CFK) ensuring highly reliable zero-downtime installs and upgrades and lifecycle for Confluent customers.
● CP Security - AuthN/AuthZ, OAuth, mTLS and compliance protocols for regulated customers in Finserv, Telecom, Insurance, and Banking.
● CP Monitoring & Management - fleet health, RBAC, and Confluent Control Center across customers’ multi-geography cluster deployments.
● Gateway - Self managed high performance Kafka proxy products to help migrate customers to CP or CC, provide governance, DR and external sharing capabilities.
What We’re Looking For
● 3+ years of hands-on software development experience building and supporting production systems.
● Strong programming and problem-solving fundamentals in at least one major language (Java, Go, C/C++, Python, or similar), and the ability to pick up new ones.
● Working understanding of distributed systems and systems fundamentals (disk, network, operating systems); exposure to concurrent or multi-threaded programming.
● Experience deploying and operating services in the cloud, including containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
● A focus on quality and reliability - testing strategies, observability, and learning from incidents.
● Self-motivated and comfortable owning well-defined problems from start to finish, asking for help when it speeds things up.
● Clear communicator who can explain technical decisions to teammates and stakeholders.
● Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
● Willing to take customer-facing on-call shifts and debug production issues.
What’s a Deal-Breaker for Us
● Needing every step spelled out; we expect you to dig into a problem before escalating it.
● Treating on-call, testing, and operational work as someone else’s job.
