Confluent - Staff Software Engineer - Stream Processing & Analytics

IBM is a technology company developing AI-powered, cloud-native software and hybrid cloud solutions. This role builds Confluent Cloud AI capabilities for real-time streaming data, owning backend services, cross-system designs, model lifecycle, inference routing, and agent execution. The engineer also drives quality, reliability, technical alignment, mentoring, and on-call operations.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build the backend services (primarily Go, Java, and Python) that run AI and model inference on real-time data
• Own features end to end — drafting the design, aligning stakeholders inside and outside the team, and driving the decision to a conclusion
• Make the technical calls on systems that span teams: model lifecycle, inference routing, and agent execution
• Own the quality of what you ship — code, test coverage, documentation, operability, and rollout safety. This is production infrastructure serving live inference, so reliability isn't an afterthought
• Make the engineers around you better through code review, design feedback, and being someone the team trusts with ambiguous, cross-cutting work
• Participate in on-call for the services your team owns, and help keep the team's processes and rituals healthy

Requirements:

• Bachelor's Degree
• 10+ years of significant experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems or cloud-native backend infrastructure in production
• Strong working knowledge of Kubernetes and distributed-systems patterns (control loops, API servers, high-scale control planes), plus the fundamentals — containerization, networking, resource isolation
• Proficiency in at least one of Go, Java, or Python, and the willingness to work across all three
• A track record of leading cross-team technical work: turning ambiguous requirements into designs others can rally behind
• Excellent written and verbal communication — you can write a design doc that aligns people who don't report to you
• Some travel may be required based on business demand
• IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship
• Master's Degree
• Exposure to model serving, LLM/agent infrastructure, or streaming data systems
• You don't need a background in ML research or model training — this role is about building and operating the platform that serves AI reliably at scale, not inventing the models