Senior Software Engineer II

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 About Product & Team:

Kafka Connect is the foundational streaming integration framework for Apache Kafka. It enables reliable, scalable data movement between Kafka and the broader ecosystem of databases, cloud services, and storage systems. Designed for mission-critical production environments, this highly configurable system provides a distributed and fault-tolerant architecture that supports high-volume data pipelines across hybrid and cloud-native deployments. As a strategic core of the Confluent Cloud platform, our team builds the extensible engine that transforms and routes data streams at scale, powering the infrastructure that our customers rely on for their most critical data workflows.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and operationalize high-performance, scalable, and resilient distributed systems for the Kafka Connect platform.
• Independently own the end-to-end execution of complex technical projects, ensuring high-quality delivery in production.
• Solve complex challenges in the stream processing space using cloud and on-premises resources to improve the performance, scalability, and elasticity of Kafka Connectors.
• Engage with the Open Source community to provide technical guidance and thought leadership.
• Promote a culture of engineering excellence through clear communication, high-quality execution, and effective collaboration.

Preferred Education Master’s Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• 5 to 10 years of experience in backend engineering.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development
• Experience in building and operating large-scale production services in public cloud environments (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Solid understanding of relational or non-relational database systems and systems operations (networking, operating systems, etc.).
• Proficiency in Java, Go, or C/C++, and experience with Kubernetes and Terraform.
• Understanding of systems operations (databases, networking, operating systems).
• A self-starter with the ability to work effectively in a team and excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Empathetic and collaborative team player.
• Strong sense of ownership and commitment to team and company success.
• Self-starter driven by the challenges of a fast-paced software environment.

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Experience in open-source development.
• Experience using Apache Kafka.