Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Systems (Kafka/Cloud)

International Business Machines Corporation; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 185,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software in San Diego is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design, build, and operate distributed systems powering Confluent Cloud workloads. You will work on Kafka-based services, broker reliability, performance, and coordination, collaborating across product, infra, and engineering teams.

Master's degree preferred; strong debugging, observability, and on–call experience are required to ensure durable, scalable solutions in a fast-moving environment.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering experience building and operating distributed systems.
• Proficiency in Java or another JVM language and large codebase experience.
• Knowledge of core distributed systems concepts, including concurrency, replication, fault tolerance, and performance tradeoffs.
• Experience diagnosing production issues with 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.

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver distributed systems features for Kafka-based cloud services with focus on correctness, availability, latency, throughput, and efficiency.
• Build and evolve systems that support Confluent Cloud, including kafka broker, compute, networking, and coordination capabilities.
• Improve production reliability through observability, testing, and operational tooling.
• Investigate complex performance and production issues, identify root causes, and drive durable fixes.
• Lead technical design for cross-service projects and communicate tradeoffs clearly.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and engineering teams to translate 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 and ownership.

Skills

Distributed systems

Java / JVM

Kafka

Performance tuning

Code reviews

Education

Master's Degree

Tools

Apache Kafka

Kubernetes

Cloud platforms

Job description

IBM Software in San Diego is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design, build, and operate distributed systems powering Confluent Cloud workloads. You will work on Kafka-based services, broker reliability, performance, and coordination, collaborating across product, infra, and engineering teams.

Master's degree preferred; strong debugging, observability, and on–call experience are required to ensure durable, scalable solutions in a fast-moving environment.