Senior Software Engineer, Cloud Kafka & Systems

International Business Machines Corporation; Boston (KY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 175,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to design, build, and operate distributed systems powering Kafka workloads at cloud scale. You will work across broker reliability, platform capabilities, networking, and coordination services, partnering with cross-functional teams.

You will own end-to-end delivery from design to production support, mentoring teammates and driving durable, scalable solutions while prioritizing reliability and security.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering experience building and operating distributed systems or large-scale backend services.
• Proficiency in Java or another JVM language with experience in a large codebase.
• Knowledge of distributed systems concepts: concurrency, replication, fault tolerance, performance Tradeoffs.
• Experience designing reliable services and diagnosing production issues with logs, metrics, traces, and profiling tools.
• Track record of taking ambiguous technical problems from design through delivery and ownership.
• Strong written and verbal communication, collaboration across teams, and ability to explain technical decisions.
• Customer-focused approach and a commitment to secure, resilient systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver distributed systems features for Kafka-based cloud services, focusing on correctness, availability, latency, throughput, and resource efficiency.
• Build and evolve systems that support Confluent Cloud, including Kafka broker, compute, networking, and coordination capabilities.
• Improve production reliability through 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 for cross-team projects, communicating tradeoffs and risks.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and engineering teams to translate customer needs into safe, scalable solutions.
• Participate in code reviews, on-call, incident response, and continuous improvement of engineering practices.
• Mentor teammates and foster a culture of thoughtful design, ownership, and customer focus.

Skills

Distributed systems

Java / JVM

Kafka

Performance optimization

Code reviews

Mentoring

Communication

Education

Master's Degree

Tools

Apache Kafka internals

Kubernetes

Cloud platforms

Job description

IBM Software is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to design, build, and operate distributed systems powering Kafka workloads at cloud scale. You will work across broker reliability, platform capabilities, networking, and coordination services, partnering with cross-functional teams.

You will own end-to-end delivery from design to production support, mentoring teammates and driving durable, scalable solutions while prioritizing reliability and security.