Senior Software Engineer - Confluent Kafka

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.

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

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer II to join the Tableflow team at Confluent.

In this role, you will build the metadata layer and ecosystem integrations that make Confluent Cloud data streams available in open table formats for analytics and AI use cases. Tableflow enables Kafka topics and their associated schemas to be represented as Apache Iceberg or Delta Lake tables with minimal operational complexity, helping bridge operational streaming systems and analytical lakehouse ecosystems.

As a Senior Software Engineer II, you will take strong technical ownership across the design, implementation, and operation of key metadata and integration services that run at massive scale across Confluent Cloud, with a focus on high availability, scalability, and reliability.

What You Will Do

• Design and implement backend systems for the Tableflow metadata layer, including metadata management, schema handling, and lifecycle coordination
• Build and evolve integrations with open table technologies and ecosystem platforms such as Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, and catalog services
• Take end-to-end ownership of key technical areas, from design and development through rollout, operations, and continuous improvement
• Improve scalability, performance, and resiliency for multi-tenant cloud environments
• Partner closely with product management and other engineering teams to deliver features that integrate cleanly into the broader Confluent Cloud platform
• Strengthen operational excellence through observability, automation, incident response, and root-cause analysis
• Contribute to code quality, testing, documentation, engineering best practices, and mentorship across the team

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• Minimum 5 - 8 years demonstrated professional software engineering experience building backend, infrastructure, or data platform systems
• Experience building and operating large-scale database systems or distributed systems
• Experience building services on public cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP
• Strong programming skills in Java Core or a similar backend or systems language
• Experience debugging complex production issues and improving service reliability over time
• Ability to independently drive ambiguous technical problems from problem statement to production-ready solution

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Experience with Apache Kafka and real-time data infrastructure
• Hands-on experience with Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, or related open table technologies
• Experience building metadata services, storage systems, query systems, or database-adjacent platforms
• Experience contributing to open-source projects
• Interest in technical writing, conference speaking, or developer/community evangelism