Senior Software Engineer II, Confluent Secure Compute

IBM Software is transforming client challenges into solutions by building AI-powered, cloud-native products. The Senior Software Engineer II will lead the design and implementation of backend services in a cloud-native environment, focusing on reliability and performance while mentoring other engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Own and lead the design and implementation of complex backend services and systems in a cloud-native, microservices-based environment
• Make architecture and technical decisions that balance reliability, scalability, performance, and operability, and clearly communicate the tradeoffs
• Drive projects end to end: from requirements and design through implementation, rollout, and ongoing operation in production
• Improve service reliability and operations by defining SLOs/SLAs, strengthening observability, and participating in on-call as needed
• Collaborate across teams to define APIs, integration points, and data models that keep the platform coherent and evolvable
• Identify and drive platform and productivity improvements (tooling, automation, process) that raise the bar for the broader engineering organization
• Mentor and support other engineers through code reviews, design reviews, and technical guidance, helping grow the team’s capabilities
• Contribute to a culture of continuous improvement, inclusive collaboration, and high technical standards

Requirements:

• 5+ years industry experience designing, building, and supporting backend systems in production with a solid grasp on good software engineering practices such as code reviews, deep focus on quality, and documentation
• Strong knowledge of Python runtime environments (virtual environments, package management, and interpreter configurations)
• Strong programming and algorithmic skills. Proficiency in a major programming language, e.g. Python, Go, C / C++, Java, etc
• Strong experience running services in a public cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including containers and orchestration (for example, Docker, Kubernetes) and modern cloud native technologies
• Expertise in other Language Runtimes / VMs (JVM/WASM, etc.) a big plus
• A track record of technical leadership: driving projects, influencing architecture, and coordinating work across multiple engineers or teams
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to align stakeholders, explain complex ideas clearly, and drive decisions
• Experience with observability and operational excellence (metrics, logging, tracing, incident response, and postmortems)
• Education in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience
• Proven track record of leading the delivery of large-scale, highly available, low latency, high quality systems
• Deep hands-on technical expertise in large scale systems engineering, distributed systems, and any of the container sandboxing technologies
• On-call experience handling critical systems