Confluent - Staff Software Engineer - Stream Processing & Analytics

IBM Computing; North Carolina; On-site; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software is building Confluent Cloud's AI capabilities, delivering in-place AI on streaming data across the platform. As an engineer, you will own end-to-end features, influencing design across multiple services, and ensuring reliable, scalable real-time inference on live data.

You will work across Go, Java, and Python, shaping the user-facing API, model lifecycle, and control planes while collaborating with multiple teams to align on architecture and execution.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of distributed systems experience in production
• Strong knowledge of Kubernetes and distributed-systems patterns
• Proficiency in Go, Java, or Python and willingness to work across all three
• Track record leading cross-team technical work with design buy-in
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Responsibilities

• Design and build backend services (Go/Java/Python) for AI and model inference on real-time data
• Own features end-to-end from design to rollout
• Make cross-team technical decisions spanning multiple services
• Ensure code quality, tests, documentation, and operability for production systems
• Lead code reviews and mentor teammates to raise team-wide technical quality
• Participate in on-call for services owned by the team

Skills

Distributed systems

Go/Java/Python

Cross-team leadership

Communication skills

Cloud-native backend

Tools

Kubernetes

API servers

Containerization

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 Role:

You’ll help build Confluent Cloud's AI capabilities — the layer that lets customers bring AI and AI agents capabilities directly to their real-time data. Instead of moving data out to a separate system to run inference or build an agent, our customers do it in place, on streaming data, as part of the same platform they already use to move and process events at scale.

As an engineer, you’ll own delivery of significant pieces of this product — not just writing code, but deciding how a capability should work across the services that make it up. The interesting problems here rarely live in one place: shipping something like inference-on-streaming-data or an AI agent that reacts to live events touches several systems at once — the user-facing API, the services that manage model and agent lifecycle, the control plane that schedules and runs the work, and the serving layer that actually executes inference. You’ll be expected to reason across those boundaries, make sound design calls, and get engineers inside and outside the team aligned on the approach.

What You Will Do:

• 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.

Required technical and professional expertise

• 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.

Preferred technical and professional experience

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.

IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.