Confluent - Senior Software Engineer - Incident Response Tooling

International Business Machines Corporation; Ottawa; On-site; CAD 100,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software is seeking an engineer to own the incident foundation for our Confluent Cloud across AWS, GCP, and Azure. You’ll run our incident tooling, define metrics, and turn data into actionable guidance for engineering leadership.

Roughly 75% of your time will be hands-on engineering—configuration, automation, and data work—while 25% focuses on partnering with incident commanders and engineering teams to improve reliability across the platform.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in SRE, production operations, DevOps or a related engineering role.
• Hands-on admin experience with incident or on-call tooling (PagerDuty, Rootly, Opsgenie, incident.io or similar).
• Proficiency in Python, Go or a similar language for scripting and API integrations.
• Strong SQL and data analysis skills; experience building dashboards (Looker, Grafana, Tableau or similar).
• Cloud experience with at least one of AWS, GCP or Azure (we run all three).
• Clear written communication: runbooks, metric definitions, and reports for engineering leadership.

Responsibilities

• Own Rootly and PagerDuty configuration: workflows, escalation policies, schedules, services, form fields and severity definitions
• Build and maintain integrations between Rootly, PagerDuty, Jira, Confluence, Slack and our service catalog
• Define and document incident metrics (MTTD, MTTM, MTTR, volume by severity, team and root cause) so they're calculated the same way everywhere
• Build dashboards and recurring reports on incident trends, and surface repeat offenders and detection gaps
• Keep incident data accurate: audit for missing or inconsistent fields and automate fixes where possible
• Support incident commanders and on-call engineers with tooling questions, onboarding and documentation
• Write automation against vendor APIs to reduce manual incident toil

Skills

SRE experience

Incident management

Python or Go scripting

Data analysis with SQL

Technical communication

Education

Master's Degree

Tools

PagerDuty

Rootly

Opsgenie

incident.io

Python

Go

Looker

Grafana

Tableau

AWS

GCP

Azure

Jira

Confluence

Job description

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

Confluent Cloud processes millions of events per second across AWS, GCP, and Azure. When something breaks, the incident stack has to work: the right people get paged, the incident is tracked from detection to resolution, and afterwards the data tells us what happened and where to invest. We're looking for an engineer to own that foundation.

You'll run our incident management tooling day to day, owning PagerDuty and Rootly. You'll also define how we measure incidents and turn that data into analysis that engineering leadership acts on. Roughly 75% of your time is hands‑on engineering: configuration, automation, integrations and data work. The other 25% is partnering with engineering teams and incident commanders.

You'll be part of a global team with follow-the-sun coverage and clean handoffs that keep everyone working sustainable hours. This role sits within Cloud Architecture and Reliability - Supportability, a horizontal team that owns reliability standards and tooling across engineering.

What You Will Do

• Own Rootly and PagerDuty configuration: workflows, escalation policies, schedules, services, form fields and severity definitions
• Build and maintain integrations between Rootly, PagerDuty, Jira, Confluence, Slack and our service catalog
• Define and document incident metrics (MTTD, MTTM, MTTR, volume by severity, team and root cause) so they're calculated the same way everywhere
• Build dashboards and recurring reports on incident trends, and surface repeat offenders and detection gaps
• Keep incident data accurate: audit for missing or inconsistent fields and automate fixes where possible
• Support incident commanders and on‑call engineers with tooling questions, onboarding and documentation
• Write automation against vendor APIs to reduce manual incident toil

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• 4+ years in SRE, production operations, DevOps or a related engineering role
• Hands‑on admin experience with incident or on‑call tooling (PagerDuty, Rootly, Opsgenie, incident.io or similar)
• Proficiency in Python, Go or a similar language for scripting and API integrations
• Strong SQL and data analysis skills; experience building dashboards (Looker, Grafana, Tableau or similar)
• Cloud experience with at least one of AWS, GCP or Azure (we run all three)
• Clear written communication: runbooks, metric definitions, and reports for engineering leadership

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Familiarity with incident management practices: severity frameworks, post‑mortems, SLOs and error budgets
• On‑call or incident commander experience
• BigQuery or another cloud data warehouse
• Exposure to Kafka or distributed systems