Principal Engineer - Confluent

IBM; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the technical vision, architecture, and operations of Confluent Kafka Connectors. You will drive innovation, shape the roadmap, and mentor engineers across global teams.

With 15+ years of software development and strong distributed systems and cloud experience, you will influence technology decisions and help IBM deliver scalable streaming data solutions to customers worldwide.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree required.
• 15+ years of hands-on software development experience.
• Experience building and operating large-scale systems in public clouds.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical vision, architecture, execution, and operations of Confluent Kafka Connectors.
• Guide the Connect team in driving innovation and product roadmap.
• Mentor engineers and leaders; foster a culture of excellence and inclusion.

Skills

Hands-on software dev

Distributed systems

Public clouds

Mentorship

Team leadership

Effective communication

Education

Bachelor's Degree

Master's Degree

Tools

Kafka Connect

Apache Kafka

Elasticsearch

Hadoop

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

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

Required education

• Bachelor's Degree

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.

Years of Experience: 15 - 20

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. In most organizations data is spread across multiple clouds, on premises, in private datacenters, and at the edge. IBM’s AI and data platform scales and accelerates the impact of AI with trusted data, and provides leading capabilities to train, tune and deploy AI across business. IBM’s hybrid cloud platform is one of the most comprehensive and consistent approach to development, security, and operations across hybrid environments—a flexible foundation for leveraging data, wherever it resides, to extend AI deep into a business.

YOUR LIFE @ IBM

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on‑going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can‑do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.

Are you ready to be an IBMer?

ABOUT IBM

IBM’s greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we’re also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.

At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it’s time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.

IBM 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, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.