Senior Software Engineer - Cloud-Scale Kafka

International Business Machines Corporation; Tucson (AZ); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software in the United States seeks a Senior Software Engineer on Kora Compute to design, build, and operate distributed systems powering Kafka workloads at cloud scale. You will work with across engineering, product, and cloud infrastructure teams to deliver safe, scalable solutions.

Join a culture of curiosity, collaboration, and continuous learning as you tackle complex reliability, performance, and ownership challenges and mentor teammates toward thoughtful design and customer focus.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering experience building and operating distributed systems or large-scale backend services.
• Proficiency in Java or another JVM language; Kafka or stream processing is a plus.
• Knowledge of distributed systems concepts: concurrency, replication, fault tolerance, latency tradeoffs.
• Experience designing reliable services and diagnosing production issues using logs, metrics, traces, and profiling tools.
• Track record of taking ambiguous technical problems from design through delivery and ownership.
• Strong written and verbal communication; able to collaborate across teams.

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver distributed systems features for Kafka-based cloud services.
• Build and evolve systems supporting Confluent Cloud: broker, compute, networking, and coordination.
• Improve production reliability with failure handling, observability, testing, and tooling.
• Investigate performance and production issues; identify root causes and implement fixes.
• Lead technical design and implementation across services and teams.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, engineering to translate needs into scalable solutions.
• Participate in code reviews, on-call, incident response, and continuous improvement.
• Mentor teammates and promote thoughtful design and customer focus.

Skills

Distributed systems

Java/JVM

Production diagnostics

Communication

Tools

Kafka

Observability tools

Job description

IBM Software in the United States seeks a Senior Software Engineer on Kora Compute to design, build, and operate distributed systems powering Kafka workloads at cloud scale. You will work with across engineering, product, and cloud infrastructure teams to deliver safe, scalable solutions.

Join a culture of curiosity, collaboration, and continuous learning as you tackle complex reliability, performance, and ownership challenges and mentor teammates toward thoughtful design and customer focus.