Senior Software Engineer - Confluent DevProd

IBM Software is transforming client challenges into solutions with AI-powered, cloud-native products. They are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join their Developer Productivity team, focusing on building and maintaining internal platform services and tools that enhance developer experience and engineering velocity for Confluent products.

Responsibilities:

• Explore AI-assisted developer workflows— evaluate AI tools and frameworks, run experiments, and help integrate useful ones with appropriate guardrails (e.g., coding assistants, intelligent test caching and avoidance, skills and workflows to optimize repetitive developer tasks)
• Build and maintain foundational developer infrastructure— including source code repository management, build automation, artifact management, containerization, and CI/CD pipelines for both our cloud and on-premise platforms
• Contribute to internal developer platform services— implement features for secure, multi-tenant services that assist with and accelerate the SDLC (e.g., service bootstrapping, test infrastructure, developer portals), and help keep them reliable and well-monitored
• Participate in design and code reviews— contribute to one-pagers and design docs for your work, review peers' PRs constructively, and incorporate feedback
• Participate in on-call and team best practices— share in on-call rotation for components your team owns, follow tested runbooks for production operations, write clear documentation, and collaborate with engineers on other teams to unblock cross-team efforts

Requirements:

• Education & Experience— BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related field (or equivalent experience), and 3+ years of professional software engineering experience building cloud services, platforms, or distributed systems
• Technical Foundations— Solid grasp of algorithms, data structures, and distributed systems fundamentals; proficiency in at least one statically typed language (e.g., Java, Go) plus a scripting language (e.g., Python)
• DevOps Familiarity— Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions), containers, and at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP), along with working knowledge of source control (Git) and build frameworks (e.g., Maven, Gradle, Bazel)
• Quality & Operations— Write code with appropriate testing, logging, and error handling; comfortable running production operations from documented runbooks and participating in on-call rotations
• Collaboration & Communication— Clear written and verbal communication; participate constructively in design discussions and PR reviews; work effectively with engineers across teams to unblock yourself and your peers
• AI Curiosity— Interest in integrating AI/ML or LLM-based capabilities into developer or platform workflows. You don't need prior AI experience, but you're comfortable learning and evaluating new tools
• Master's Degree
• Hands-on experience building or integrating AI-powered developer tools (e.g., code assistants, triage copilots, anomaly detection over logs/metrics, intelligent test selection)
• Experience with configuration management and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools, plus secrets management (e.g., Ansible, Puppet, Packer, Terraform, Consul, Vault)
• Working knowledge of databases, caching, and messaging systems (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka)