Principal Engineer - Confluent

International Business Machines Corporation; Hyderabad; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software in Hyderabad seeks a Principal Engineer to lead the Confluent Kafka Connectors engineering effort, guiding architecture and execution across core teams. You will set technical direction, drive innovation, and ensure scalable, reliable data movement between Kafka and other systems.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with product management, and shape the roadmap while maintaining high standards for throughput and reliability.

Qualifications

• Minimum of 15+ years of hands-on software development experience.
• Experience building and operating large-scale systems.
• Experience running production services in public clouds.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development.
• Self-starter with the ability to work effectively in teams.
• Timely shipping of deliverables with prioritization.
• Ability to influence technology decisions and communicate effectively.
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent.
• Willingness to take on on-call customer production issues.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical vision, architecture, execution, and operations of the Confluent Kafka Connectors product line.
• Guide the Connect team to drive innovation and maintain competitiveness.
• Partner with product management and engineering leadership to shape roadmaps.
• Mentor engineers and leads, fostering growth and accountability.
• Build processes and standards to ensure high quality and operational excellence.
• Represent engineering in India with a culture of excellence and collaboration.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud experience

Mentorship

On-call support

Leadership

Education

Master's degree

Tools

Kafka

Cloud platforms

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

About the job

We're not just building better tech. We're rewriting how data moves and what the world can do with it. With Confluent, data doesn't sit still. Our platform puts information in motion, streaming in near real-time so companies can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them.

It takes a certain kind of person to join this team. Those who ask hard questions, give honest feedback, and show up for each other. No egos, no solo acts. Just smart, curious humans pushing toward something bigger, together.

One Confluent. One Team. One Data Streaming Platform.

About The Role

We are building Kafka Connect charter which is core for scalable and reliable streaming data between Apache Kafka® and other data systems. It makes it simple to quickly define connectors that move large data sets in and out of Kafka. Kafka Connect can ingest entire databases or collect metrics from all your application servers into Kafka topics, making the data available for stream processing with low latency. An export connector can deliver data from Kafka topics into secondary indexes like Elasticsearch, or into batch systems such as Hadoop for offline analysis.

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to lead the technical vision, architecture, execution, and operations of core engineering teams that build Confluent's industry-leading Kafka Connectors. As an IC leader of this product line, you will be responsible for guiding the world-class Connect team in driving innovation and outpacing competitors.

What You Will Do

• Work with a strong team of engineers to help evolve Confluent Connect. Work closely with product management, engineering leadership, and other key stakeholders across various teams in Confluent to build and drive the overall roadmap.
• Drive the long-term direction and strategy of Confluent Kafka connectors, while partnering with internal stakeholders to drive the team’s mission forward
• Drive the technical charter for Connect, and create competitive advantages for Kafka connectors by driving innovation. Drive improvements in the Kafka connectors to make them more usable and powerful for customers, and make them easier to adopt and scale.
• Mentor a team of high-performing engineers and leads, helping them to continue in growing their skill set through hands-on experience and mentorship. Provide timely and productive feedback, encourage a growth mindset, and advise team members in setting and working toward personal development goals.
• Build a culture of continuous improvement and prioritise large and high-impact initiatives that will fundamentally change Kafka connectors.
• Be a strong technical leader and representative for engineering teams in India. Nurture a culture of excellence on the team through a focus on hiring, communication, execution, and work quality. Create and manage processes that enable the team to do its best work.
• Continue a strong growth trajectory by hiring top tier engineers, and establish quality standards, design principles, and operational maturity for the team

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• Minimum of 15+ years of hands-on software development experience with the ability to anticipate future technical needs for the product and craft plans to realize them.
• Taking ideas to production is something we look for. Ready to roll up your sleeves - code, debug, design - do whatever it takes to ship the product to production.
• Experience building and operating large-scale systems. Experience running production services in public clouds.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development.
• A self-starter with the ability to work effectively in teams. Proactively identifying the symptoms of technical issues and reason about their causes is needed. This will be followed by fixing the root causes.
• Timely shipping of deliverables; being able to trade-off short term technical decisions with the long term. Move fast, build in increments, and iterate. A sense of urgency, a mindset towards achieving results, and excellent prioritization skills.
• Ability to influence the team, peers and upper management in technology decisions using effective communication and collaborative techniques
• Strong mentorship track record, guiding the team in building out complex systems, and helping them in their professional development.
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent experience. Understanding of various technologies, programming paradigms and frameworks is needed. Ability to be pragmatic and trade off their usage in production is essential.
• Ability to take on intense customer production issues on-call; debugging and mitigating them will be needed. This requires patient log and metrics analysis with solid reasoning to nail the issue.