Senior Distributed Systems Engineer for Kafka & Cloud Scale

International Business Machines Corporation; City of Poughkeepsie (NY, AR); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design, build, and operate distributed systems powering Kafka-based cloud services at scale. You will join Kora Compute behind Confluent Cloud, taking problems from design through launch and production support in collaboration with across engineering, product, and cloud infrastructure teams.

Responsibilities include delivering reliable, high-performance services, improving observability, and leading cross-team technical design with a

Qualifications

• Experience building and operating distributed systems or large-scale backend services.
• Proficiency in Java or another JVM language; Kafka/stream processing a plus.
• Knowledge of distributed systems concepts: concurrency, replication, fault tolerance, performance.
• Experience diagnosing production issues using logs, metrics, traces, and profiling tools.
• Track record of delivering ambiguous technical problems from design through delivery and ownership.

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver distributed systems features for Kafka-based cloud services with emphasis on correctness, availability, latency, throughput, and efficiency.
• Build and evolve systems supporting Confluent Cloud: broker, compute, networking, coordination.
• Improve production reliability with failure handling, protections, observability, testing, and tooling.
• Investigate complex performance and production issues, identify root causes, and implement durable fixes.
• Lead technical design and implementation across services and teams, communicating tradeoffs and risks.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and engineering partners to translate needs into safe, scalable solutions.
• Participate in code reviews, on-call duties, incident response, and continuous improvement of engineering practices.
• Mentor teammates and promote a culture of thoughtful design and ownership.

Skills

Distributed systems

Java/JVM

Kafka

Cloud platforms

Reliability

Observability

Education

Master's Degree

Job description

IBM Software is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design, build, and operate distributed systems powering Kafka-based cloud services at scale. You will join Kora Compute behind Confluent Cloud, taking problems from design through launch and production support in collaboration with across engineering, product, and cloud infrastructure teams.

Responsibilities include delivering reliable, high-performance services, improving observability, and leading cross-team technical design with a