Senior Distributed Systems Engineer — Kafka Cloud

International Business Machines Corporation; Lowell (MA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design, build, and operate distributed systems at cloud scale, with a focus on Kafka workloads and Confluent Cloud capabilities. You will contribute to broker, compute, networking, and coordination features, ensuring reliability and high performance.

You will collaborate across product and infrastructure teams, participate in on-call and incident response, and mentor peers to foster thoughtful design and ownership.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering experience building and operating distributed systems or large-scale backend services.
• Proficiency in Java or another JVM language, with Kafka or stream processing experience.
• Knowledge of core distributed systems concepts, including concurrency, replication, fault tolerance, and performance tradeoffs.
• Experience designing reliable services and diagnosing issues in production using logs, metrics, traces, and profiling tools.
• A track record of taking ambiguous technical problems from design through delivery and operational ownership.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to collaborate across teams and explain technical decisions.
• A customer focused approach and a commitment to building secure, resilient, maintainable systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver distributed systems features for Kafka based cloud services, with attention to correctness, availability, latency, throughput, and resource efficiency.
• Build and evolve systems that support a Confluent Cloud, including kafka broker, compute, networking, and coordination capabilities.
• Improve production reliability through sound failure handling, service protections, observability, testing, and operational tooling.
• Investigate complex performance and production issues, identify root causes, and drive durable fixes.
• Lead technical design and implementation for projects that cross service and team boundaries, clearly communicating tradeoffs and risks.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and engineering partners to turn customer and platform needs into safe, scalable solutions.
• Participate in code reviews, on call, incident response, and continuous improvement of engineering practices.
• Mentor teammates and contribute to a culture of thoughtful design, ownership, and customer focus.

Skills

Distributed systems

Java

Kafka

System design

Observability

Production operations

Communication

Security/resilience

Education

Master's Degree

Tools

Kafka internals

Kubernetes

Cloud platforms

Job description

IBM Software is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design, build, and operate distributed systems at cloud scale, with a focus on Kafka workloads and Confluent Cloud capabilities. You will contribute to broker, compute, networking, and coordination features, ensuring reliability and high performance.

You will collaborate across product and infrastructure teams, participate in on-call and incident response, and mentor peers to foster thoughtful design and ownership.