Director, Engineering - Confluent

International Business Machines Corporation; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software seeks an engineering leader to guide the strategic vision, engineering, and operations of core teams building Confluent's Kafka platform. You will focus on the Confluent Cloud Brokers, Networking, and Security, operating a cloud-scale platform and driving ongoing transformation.

You will hire, mentor, and retain top engineers, set quality standards, and partner with stakeholders to deliver high-impact initiatives that advance Kafka’s capabilities in a scalable, fault-tolerant

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field.
• Master's degree preferred.

Responsibilities

• Lead a global team of software engineers and engineering leaders.
• Define and execute the long-term strategy for Confluent and Kafka in the cloud platform.
• Drive technical innovation to create competitive advantages for Confluent and Kafka.
• Collaborate with peers to prioritize improvements in culture, design principles, and operational maturity.
• Hire top-tier engineers and establish quality standards and execution discipline.

Skills

Engineering management

Distributed systems

Cloud infrastructure

Stateful data

Feature delivery

Prioritization

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree

Job description

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

We are building a massively scalable stream processing infrastructure that enables low-latency operations like filters, joins and aggregations on real-time data. This will enable our customers to easily build stateful stream-processing applications that are scalable, elastic, and fully fault-tolerant.

We are looking for an engineering leader to lead the strategic vision, engineering, and operations of core engineering teams that build Confluent's industry-leading Kafka platform. The Confluent Cloud Brokers, Networking and Security will be your primary focus. As a key leader, you will play a significant role in the ongoing transformation of the Kafka platform, driving innovation and outpacing competitors. You will be responsible for operating our cloud platform at scale.

What You Will Do:

• Lead a highly productive, global team of software engineers and engineering leaders
• Drive the long-term direction and strategy of Confluent and Kafka, while partnering with internal stakeholders to drive the team’s mission forward
• Create competitive advantages for Confluent and Kafka by driving technical innovation
• Work closely with peer engineering leaders to prioritize improvements in all these areas - from a culture of continuous improvement to prioritizing large and high-impact initiatives that will fundamentally change Kafka.
• Continue a strong growth trajectory by hiring top tier engineers, and establish quality standards, design principles, and operational maturity for the team

Required education

Bachelor's Degree

Preferred education

Master's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

• 3+ years of second-level engineering management experience leading productive, high-functioning teams.
• Maintain a high hiring bar while recruiting, motivating engineers, coaching/mentoring, and managing performance.
• Experience with running large stateful data systems in the cloud.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development.
• A great track record of shipping features and hitting deadlines consistently.
• Sense of urgency, an aggressive mindset towards achieving results, and excellent prioritization skills.

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Able to anticipate future technical needs for the product and craft plans to realize them, guided by our customers.
• Preferred experience running production services in public clouds
• Ability to influence the team, peers, and upper management using effective communication and collaborative techniques. Focus on building and maintaining a culture of collaboration within the team.

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence—from machine learning to generative AI—to help make organizations more responsive, productive, and resilient. IBM Software helps clients put AI into action now to create real value with trust, speed, and confidence across digital labor, IT automation, application modernization, security, and sustainability. Critical to this is the ability to make use of all data, because AI is only as good as the data that fuels it.