Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world†s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You†ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM†s product and technology landscape. Here, you†ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: We are a team of passionate engineers who love solving complex distributed storage and query engine problems. Through the Tableflow and Lightning Tables project, we are building the next generation of storage and query solutions for Kora to enable streaming data to be consumed both as a table and as a stream seamlessly, and queried with the performance of a purpose-built analytical engine. As a Staff Software Engineer on the team, you will focus on advancing key layers of our system, including multi-tenant, highly available compute infrastructure, the core components responsible for table materialization and background maintenance, and the query engine that serves analytical workloads over that data. You will tackle challenges such as developing strategies for efficient table materialization and maintenance at massive scale across all of Confluent Cloud, building a fast and scalable query engine, and ensuring high availability and scalability for background storage tasks and query serving. What You Will Do: - Storage Engine Development: Design and implement innovative strategies for table schematization, materialization, and compaction at massive scale. - Query Engine Development: Design and implement components for query planning, execution, and optimization for fast analytical queries. - Platform Engineering: Build and maintain multi-tenant, highly available infrastructure that powers background computational tasks for Kora's long-term storage and query serving. Ensure that the platform is optimized for scalability, reliability, and resilience, in alignment with organizational objectives. - Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with product management, design, and other engineering teams to ensure seamless integration of storage and query features and infrastructure with the broader organization. Required Skills What You Will Bring: - BS, MS, or PhD in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience - Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence and guide stakeholders at all levels. Preferred Skills What Gives You an Edge: - Familiarity with or has experience contributing to the following open-source technologies: Apache Kafka, Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, Apache Fluss - Experience with query engines or distributed SQL systems (e.g. Presto/Trino, Spark SQL, DuckDB, ClickHouse) - Experience/knowledge with public clouds (AWS, Azure or GCP) Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
11/13/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world†s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You†ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM†s product and technology landscape. Here, you†ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: We are a team of passionate engineers who love solving complex distributed storage and query engine problems. Through the Tableflow and Lightning Tables project, we are building the next generation of storage and query solutions for Kora to enable streaming data to be consumed both as a table and as a stream seamlessly, and queried with the performance of a purpose-built analytical engine. As a Staff Software Engineer on the team, you will focus on advancing key layers of our system, including multi-tenant, highly available compute infrastructure, the core components responsible for table materialization and background maintenance, and the query engine that serves analytical workloads over that data. You will tackle challenges such as developing strategies for efficient table materialization and maintenance at massive scale across all of Confluent Cloud, building a fast and scalable query engine, and ensuring high availability and scalability for background storage tasks and query serving. What You Will Do: - Storage Engine Development: Design and implement innovative strategies for table schematization, materialization, and compaction at massive scale. - Query Engine Development: Design and implement components for query planning, execution, and optimization for fast analytical queries. - Platform Engineering: Build and maintain multi-tenant, highly available infrastructure that powers background computational tasks for Kora's long-term storage and query serving. Ensure that the platform is optimized for scalability, reliability, and resilience, in alignment with organizational objectives. - Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with product management, design, and other engineering teams to ensure seamless integration of storage and query features and infrastructure with the broader organization. Required Skills What You Will Bring: - BS, MS, or PhD in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience - Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence and guide stakeholders at all levels. Preferred Skills What Gives You an Edge: - Familiarity with or has experience contributing to the following open-source technologies: Apache Kafka, Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, Apache Fluss - Experience with query engines or distributed SQL systems (e.g. Presto/Trino, Spark SQL, DuckDB, ClickHouse) - Experience/knowledge with public clouds (AWS, Azure or GCP) Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud. In this role, you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform. You'll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and cross-team leadership, identifying high-leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact. What You Will Do Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models) that support Confluent Cloud products. Lead open-ended technical initiatives by taking ambiguous problems, clarifying requirements, defining the approach, and driving execution across teams and services. Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout and rollback patterns. Collaborate across organizations, including Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and others, to align on designs, trade-offs, and long-term platform direction. Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team. Continuously improve the developer experience for our control-plane stack through tooling, automation, CI/CD, and test strategy enhancements that reduce toil and increase velocity. Influence technical strategy within your domain by identifying high-impact opportunities, proposing roadmaps, and helping prioritize work aligned with business goals. Contribute to engineering culture through documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing, including internal talks, wikis, and external content where appropriate. Required Skills Experienced builder: Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production. Distributed systems & cloud expert: Deep hands-on experience with one or more of the following: Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, and scalability). Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native architectures. Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms. Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation. Architect and executor: Ability to define end-to-end designs, break work into milestones, de-risk early, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule. Operationally rigorous: Strong understanding of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response, with a focus on designing for safe change and graceful degradation. Great communicator: Ability to write clear design documents, articulate trade-offs effectively, and lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, product managers, and leadership. Leader without authority: Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction beyond immediate ownership, and helping other engineers grow and succeed. Values-aligned: Committed to customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and team success, with a focus on building durable solutions rather than simply shipping features. Preferred Skills Experience building control-plane systems, including APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, and provisioning or orchestration workflows. Background working with Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems. Experience designing and operating multi-region, high-availability, or disaster recovery architectures. Experience working on security-sensitive infrastructure, including identity, certificates, secrets management, mTLS, policy enforcement, or compliance-driven environments. Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, conference presentations, or other forms of technical thought leadership in relevant domains. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
11/13/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud. In this role, you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform. You'll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and cross-team leadership, identifying high-leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact. What You Will Do Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models) that support Confluent Cloud products. Lead open-ended technical initiatives by taking ambiguous problems, clarifying requirements, defining the approach, and driving execution across teams and services. Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout and rollback patterns. Collaborate across organizations, including Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and others, to align on designs, trade-offs, and long-term platform direction. Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team. Continuously improve the developer experience for our control-plane stack through tooling, automation, CI/CD, and test strategy enhancements that reduce toil and increase velocity. Influence technical strategy within your domain by identifying high-impact opportunities, proposing roadmaps, and helping prioritize work aligned with business goals. Contribute to engineering culture through documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing, including internal talks, wikis, and external content where appropriate. Required Skills Experienced builder: Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production. Distributed systems & cloud expert: Deep hands-on experience with one or more of the following: Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, and scalability). Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native architectures. Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms. Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation. Architect and executor: Ability to define end-to-end designs, break work into milestones, de-risk early, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule. Operationally rigorous: Strong understanding of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response, with a focus on designing for safe change and graceful degradation. Great communicator: Ability to write clear design documents, articulate trade-offs effectively, and lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, product managers, and leadership. Leader without authority: Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction beyond immediate ownership, and helping other engineers grow and succeed. Values-aligned: Committed to customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and team success, with a focus on building durable solutions rather than simply shipping features. Preferred Skills Experience building control-plane systems, including APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, and provisioning or orchestration workflows. Background working with Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems. Experience designing and operating multi-region, high-availability, or disaster recovery architectures. Experience working on security-sensitive infrastructure, including identity, certificates, secrets management, mTLS, policy enforcement, or compliance-driven environments. Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, conference presentations, or other forms of technical thought leadership in relevant domains. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: Today, enterprises stitch together separate systems for streaming, analytics, and serving. Each of these systems come with its own latency, cost, and operational overhead. The next evolution of Confluent's platform collapses that complexity by continuously materializing streaming data into fast, queryable state that serves real-time analytics, operational applications, and downstream intelligent systems from a single foundation. As a Staff Product Manager, you'll own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the core streaming analytics engine underlying Confluent's real-time data platform. This system sits at the intersection of stream processing, real-time analytical databases, and modern serving infrastructure, continuously transforming data in motion into low-latency, queryable materialized views that power AI agents, dashboards, operational queries, and event-driven applications. You'll own the engine: the storage, materialization, query layer, and performance, while partnering with peer product managers who own the downstream product experiences built on top of it. This is a foundational, high-leverage role. You'll define a new product category that brings together concepts from streaming analytics, real-time OLAP, materialized views, and modern database systems into a cloud-native, streaming-first architecture. You'll partner directly with engineering, design, and senior leadership to bring this to market and position Confluent as a compelling alternative to standalone real-time analytical databases. What You Will Do: Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience. Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative. Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics. Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale. Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it. Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning. Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud. Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area. Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership. Required Skills What You Will Bring: Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles. 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch. Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering. Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space. Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization. Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership. Preferred Skills Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems. Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user. Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure. Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery. Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models. Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
11/13/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: Today, enterprises stitch together separate systems for streaming, analytics, and serving. Each of these systems come with its own latency, cost, and operational overhead. The next evolution of Confluent's platform collapses that complexity by continuously materializing streaming data into fast, queryable state that serves real-time analytics, operational applications, and downstream intelligent systems from a single foundation. As a Staff Product Manager, you'll own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the core streaming analytics engine underlying Confluent's real-time data platform. This system sits at the intersection of stream processing, real-time analytical databases, and modern serving infrastructure, continuously transforming data in motion into low-latency, queryable materialized views that power AI agents, dashboards, operational queries, and event-driven applications. You'll own the engine: the storage, materialization, query layer, and performance, while partnering with peer product managers who own the downstream product experiences built on top of it. This is a foundational, high-leverage role. You'll define a new product category that brings together concepts from streaming analytics, real-time OLAP, materialized views, and modern database systems into a cloud-native, streaming-first architecture. You'll partner directly with engineering, design, and senior leadership to bring this to market and position Confluent as a compelling alternative to standalone real-time analytical databases. What You Will Do: Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience. Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative. Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics. Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale. Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it. Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning. Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud. Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area. Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership. Required Skills What You Will Bring: Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles. 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch. Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering. Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space. Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization. Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership. Preferred Skills Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems. Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user. Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure. Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery. Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models. Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: Today, enterprises stitch together separate systems for streaming, analytics, and serving. Each of these systems come with its own latency, cost, and operational overhead. The next evolution of Confluent's platform collapses that complexity by continuously materializing streaming data into fast, queryable state that serves real-time analytics, operational applications, and downstream intelligent systems from a single foundation. As a Staff Product Manager, you'll own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the core streaming analytics engine underlying Confluent's real-time data platform. This system sits at the intersection of stream processing, real-time analytical databases, and modern serving infrastructure, continuously transforming data in motion into low-latency, queryable materialized views that power AI agents, dashboards, operational queries, and event-driven applications. You'll own the engine: the storage, materialization, query layer, and performance, while partnering with peer product managers who own the downstream product experiences built on top of it. This is a foundational, high-leverage role. You'll define a new product category that brings together concepts from streaming analytics, real-time OLAP, materialized views, and modern database systems into a cloud-native, streaming-first architecture. You'll partner directly with engineering, design, and senior leadership to bring this to market and position Confluent as a compelling alternative to standalone real-time analytical databases. What You Will Do: Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience. Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative. Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics. Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale. Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it. Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning. Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud. Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area. Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership. Required Skills What You Will Bring: Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles. 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch. Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering. Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space. Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization. Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership. Preferred Skills Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems. Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user. Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure. Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery. Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models. Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
11/13/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: Today, enterprises stitch together separate systems for streaming, analytics, and serving. Each of these systems come with its own latency, cost, and operational overhead. The next evolution of Confluent's platform collapses that complexity by continuously materializing streaming data into fast, queryable state that serves real-time analytics, operational applications, and downstream intelligent systems from a single foundation. As a Staff Product Manager, you'll own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the core streaming analytics engine underlying Confluent's real-time data platform. This system sits at the intersection of stream processing, real-time analytical databases, and modern serving infrastructure, continuously transforming data in motion into low-latency, queryable materialized views that power AI agents, dashboards, operational queries, and event-driven applications. You'll own the engine: the storage, materialization, query layer, and performance, while partnering with peer product managers who own the downstream product experiences built on top of it. This is a foundational, high-leverage role. You'll define a new product category that brings together concepts from streaming analytics, real-time OLAP, materialized views, and modern database systems into a cloud-native, streaming-first architecture. You'll partner directly with engineering, design, and senior leadership to bring this to market and position Confluent as a compelling alternative to standalone real-time analytical databases. What You Will Do: Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience. Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative. Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics. Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale. Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it. Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning. Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud. Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area. Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership. Required Skills What You Will Bring: Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles. 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch. Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering. Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space. Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization. Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership. Preferred Skills Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems. Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user. Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure. Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery. Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models. Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud. In this role, you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform. You'll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and cross-team leadership, identifying high-leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact. What You Will Do Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models) that support Confluent Cloud products. Lead open-ended technical initiatives by taking ambiguous problems, clarifying requirements, defining the approach, and driving execution across teams and services. Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout and rollback patterns. Collaborate across organizations, including Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and others, to align on designs, trade-offs, and long-term platform direction. Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team. Continuously improve the developer experience for our control-plane stack through tooling, automation, CI/CD, and test strategy enhancements that reduce toil and increase velocity. Influence technical strategy within your domain by identifying high-impact opportunities, proposing roadmaps, and helping prioritize work aligned with business goals. Contribute to engineering culture through documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing, including internal talks, wikis, and external content where appropriate. Required Skills Experienced builder: Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production. Distributed systems & cloud expert: Deep hands-on experience with one or more of the following: Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, and scalability). Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native architectures. Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms. Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation. Architect and executor: Ability to define end-to-end designs, break work into milestones, de-risk early, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule. Operationally rigorous: Strong understanding of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response, with a focus on designing for safe change and graceful degradation. Great communicator: Ability to write clear design documents, articulate trade-offs effectively, and lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, product managers, and leadership. Leader without authority: Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction beyond immediate ownership, and helping other engineers grow and succeed. Values-aligned: Committed to customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and team success, with a focus on building durable solutions rather than simply shipping features. Preferred Skills Experience building control-plane systems, including APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, and provisioning or orchestration workflows. Background working with Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems. Experience designing and operating multi-region, high-availability, or disaster recovery architectures. Experience working on security-sensitive infrastructure, including identity, certificates, secrets management, mTLS, policy enforcement, or compliance-driven environments. Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, conference presentations, or other forms of technical thought leadership in relevant domains. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
11/13/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud. In this role, you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform. You'll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and cross-team leadership, identifying high-leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact. What You Will Do Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models) that support Confluent Cloud products. Lead open-ended technical initiatives by taking ambiguous problems, clarifying requirements, defining the approach, and driving execution across teams and services. Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout and rollback patterns. Collaborate across organizations, including Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and others, to align on designs, trade-offs, and long-term platform direction. Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team. Continuously improve the developer experience for our control-plane stack through tooling, automation, CI/CD, and test strategy enhancements that reduce toil and increase velocity. Influence technical strategy within your domain by identifying high-impact opportunities, proposing roadmaps, and helping prioritize work aligned with business goals. Contribute to engineering culture through documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing, including internal talks, wikis, and external content where appropriate. Required Skills Experienced builder: Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production. Distributed systems & cloud expert: Deep hands-on experience with one or more of the following: Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, and scalability). Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native architectures. Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms. Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation. Architect and executor: Ability to define end-to-end designs, break work into milestones, de-risk early, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule. Operationally rigorous: Strong understanding of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response, with a focus on designing for safe change and graceful degradation. Great communicator: Ability to write clear design documents, articulate trade-offs effectively, and lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, product managers, and leadership. Leader without authority: Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction beyond immediate ownership, and helping other engineers grow and succeed. Values-aligned: Committed to customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and team success, with a focus on building durable solutions rather than simply shipping features. Preferred Skills Experience building control-plane systems, including APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, and provisioning or orchestration workflows. Background working with Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems. Experience designing and operating multi-region, high-availability, or disaster recovery architectures. Experience working on security-sensitive infrastructure, including identity, certificates, secrets management, mTLS, policy enforcement, or compliance-driven environments. Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, conference presentations, or other forms of technical thought leadership in relevant domains. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud. In this role, you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform. You'll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and cross-team leadership, identifying high-leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact. What You Will Do Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models) that support Confluent Cloud products. Lead open-ended technical initiatives by taking ambiguous problems, clarifying requirements, defining the approach, and driving execution across teams and services. Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout and rollback patterns. Collaborate across organizations, including Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and others, to align on designs, trade-offs, and long-term platform direction. Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team. Continuously improve the developer experience for our control-plane stack through tooling, automation, CI/CD, and test strategy enhancements that reduce toil and increase velocity. Influence technical strategy within your domain by identifying high-impact opportunities, proposing roadmaps, and helping prioritize work aligned with business goals. Contribute to engineering culture through documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing, including internal talks, wikis, and external content where appropriate. Required Skills Experienced builder: Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production. Distributed systems & cloud expert: Deep hands-on experience with one or more of the following: Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, and scalability). Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native architectures. Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms. Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation. Architect and executor: Ability to define end-to-end designs, break work into milestones, de-risk early, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule. Operationally rigorous: Strong understanding of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response, with a focus on designing for safe change and graceful degradation. Great communicator: Ability to write clear design documents, articulate trade-offs effectively, and lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, product managers, and leadership. Leader without authority: Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction beyond immediate ownership, and helping other engineers grow and succeed. Values-aligned: Committed to customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and team success, with a focus on building durable solutions rather than simply shipping features. Preferred Skills Experience building control-plane systems, including APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, and provisioning or orchestration workflows. Background working with Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems. Experience designing and operating multi-region, high-availability, or disaster recovery architectures. Experience working on security-sensitive infrastructure, including identity, certificates, secrets management, mTLS, policy enforcement, or compliance-driven environments. Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, conference presentations, or other forms of technical thought leadership in relevant domains. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
11/13/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud. In this role, you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform. You'll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and cross-team leadership, identifying high-leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact. What You Will Do Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models) that support Confluent Cloud products. Lead open-ended technical initiatives by taking ambiguous problems, clarifying requirements, defining the approach, and driving execution across teams and services. Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout and rollback patterns. Collaborate across organizations, including Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and others, to align on designs, trade-offs, and long-term platform direction. Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team. Continuously improve the developer experience for our control-plane stack through tooling, automation, CI/CD, and test strategy enhancements that reduce toil and increase velocity. Influence technical strategy within your domain by identifying high-impact opportunities, proposing roadmaps, and helping prioritize work aligned with business goals. Contribute to engineering culture through documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing, including internal talks, wikis, and external content where appropriate. Required Skills Experienced builder: Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production. Distributed systems & cloud expert: Deep hands-on experience with one or more of the following: Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, and scalability). Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native architectures. Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms. Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation. Architect and executor: Ability to define end-to-end designs, break work into milestones, de-risk early, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule. Operationally rigorous: Strong understanding of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response, with a focus on designing for safe change and graceful degradation. Great communicator: Ability to write clear design documents, articulate trade-offs effectively, and lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, product managers, and leadership. Leader without authority: Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction beyond immediate ownership, and helping other engineers grow and succeed. Values-aligned: Committed to customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and team success, with a focus on building durable solutions rather than simply shipping features. Preferred Skills Experience building control-plane systems, including APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, and provisioning or orchestration workflows. Background working with Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems. Experience designing and operating multi-region, high-availability, or disaster recovery architectures. Experience working on security-sensitive infrastructure, including identity, certificates, secrets management, mTLS, policy enforcement, or compliance-driven environments. Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, conference presentations, or other forms of technical thought leadership in relevant domains. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: Today, enterprises stitch together separate systems for streaming, analytics, and serving. Each of these systems come with its own latency, cost, and operational overhead. The next evolution of Confluent's platform collapses that complexity by continuously materializing streaming data into fast, queryable state that serves real-time analytics, operational applications, and downstream intelligent systems from a single foundation. As a Staff Product Manager, you'll own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the core streaming analytics engine underlying Confluent's real-time data platform. This system sits at the intersection of stream processing, real-time analytical databases, and modern serving infrastructure, continuously transforming data in motion into low-latency, queryable materialized views that power AI agents, dashboards, operational queries, and event-driven applications. You'll own the engine: the storage, materialization, query layer, and performance, while partnering with peer product managers who own the downstream product experiences built on top of it. This is a foundational, high-leverage role. You'll define a new product category that brings together concepts from streaming analytics, real-time OLAP, materialized views, and modern database systems into a cloud-native, streaming-first architecture. You'll partner directly with engineering, design, and senior leadership to bring this to market and position Confluent as a compelling alternative to standalone real-time analytical databases. What You Will Do: Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience. Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative. Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics. Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale. Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it. Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning. Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud. Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area. Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership. Required Skills What You Will Bring: Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles. 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch. Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering. Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space. Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization. Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership. Preferred Skills Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems. Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user. Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure. Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery. Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models. Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
11/13/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: Today, enterprises stitch together separate systems for streaming, analytics, and serving. Each of these systems come with its own latency, cost, and operational overhead. The next evolution of Confluent's platform collapses that complexity by continuously materializing streaming data into fast, queryable state that serves real-time analytics, operational applications, and downstream intelligent systems from a single foundation. As a Staff Product Manager, you'll own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the core streaming analytics engine underlying Confluent's real-time data platform. This system sits at the intersection of stream processing, real-time analytical databases, and modern serving infrastructure, continuously transforming data in motion into low-latency, queryable materialized views that power AI agents, dashboards, operational queries, and event-driven applications. You'll own the engine: the storage, materialization, query layer, and performance, while partnering with peer product managers who own the downstream product experiences built on top of it. This is a foundational, high-leverage role. You'll define a new product category that brings together concepts from streaming analytics, real-time OLAP, materialized views, and modern database systems into a cloud-native, streaming-first architecture. You'll partner directly with engineering, design, and senior leadership to bring this to market and position Confluent as a compelling alternative to standalone real-time analytical databases. What You Will Do: Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience. Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative. Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics. Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale. Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it. Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning. Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud. Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area. Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership. Required Skills What You Will Bring: Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles. 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch. Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering. Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space. Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization. Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership. Preferred Skills Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems. Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user. Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure. Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery. Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models. Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud. In this role, you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform. You'll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and cross-team leadership, identifying high-leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact. What You Will Do Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models) that support Confluent Cloud products. Lead open-ended technical initiatives by taking ambiguous problems, clarifying requirements, defining the approach, and driving execution across teams and services. Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout and rollback patterns. Collaborate across organizations, including Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and others, to align on designs, trade-offs, and long-term platform direction. Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team. Continuously improve the developer experience for our control-plane stack through tooling, automation, CI/CD, and test strategy enhancements that reduce toil and increase velocity. Influence technical strategy within your domain by identifying high-impact opportunities, proposing roadmaps, and helping prioritize work aligned with business goals. Contribute to engineering culture through documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing, including internal talks, wikis, and external content where appropriate. Required Skills Experienced builder: Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production. Distributed systems & cloud expert: Deep hands-on experience with one or more of the following: Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, and scalability). Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native architectures. Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms. Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation. Architect and executor: Ability to define end-to-end designs, break work into milestones, de-risk early, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule. Operationally rigorous: Strong understanding of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response, with a focus on designing for safe change and graceful degradation. Great communicator: Ability to write clear design documents, articulate trade-offs effectively, and lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, product managers, and leadership. Leader without authority: Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction beyond immediate ownership, and helping other engineers grow and succeed. Values-aligned: Committed to customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and team success, with a focus on building durable solutions rather than simply shipping features. Preferred Skills Experience building control-plane systems, including APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, and provisioning or orchestration workflows. Background working with Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems. Experience designing and operating multi-region, high-availability, or disaster recovery architectures. Experience working on security-sensitive infrastructure, including identity, certificates, secrets management, mTLS, policy enforcement, or compliance-driven environments. Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, conference presentations, or other forms of technical thought leadership in relevant domains. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
11/13/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud. In this role, you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform. You'll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and cross-team leadership, identifying high-leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact. What You Will Do Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models) that support Confluent Cloud products. Lead open-ended technical initiatives by taking ambiguous problems, clarifying requirements, defining the approach, and driving execution across teams and services. Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout and rollback patterns. Collaborate across organizations, including Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and others, to align on designs, trade-offs, and long-term platform direction. Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team. Continuously improve the developer experience for our control-plane stack through tooling, automation, CI/CD, and test strategy enhancements that reduce toil and increase velocity. Influence technical strategy within your domain by identifying high-impact opportunities, proposing roadmaps, and helping prioritize work aligned with business goals. Contribute to engineering culture through documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing, including internal talks, wikis, and external content where appropriate. Required Skills Experienced builder: Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production. Distributed systems & cloud expert: Deep hands-on experience with one or more of the following: Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, and scalability). Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native architectures. Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms. Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation. Architect and executor: Ability to define end-to-end designs, break work into milestones, de-risk early, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule. Operationally rigorous: Strong understanding of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response, with a focus on designing for safe change and graceful degradation. Great communicator: Ability to write clear design documents, articulate trade-offs effectively, and lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, product managers, and leadership. Leader without authority: Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction beyond immediate ownership, and helping other engineers grow and succeed. Values-aligned: Committed to customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and team success, with a focus on building durable solutions rather than simply shipping features. Preferred Skills Experience building control-plane systems, including APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, and provisioning or orchestration workflows. Background working with Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems. Experience designing and operating multi-region, high-availability, or disaster recovery architectures. Experience working on security-sensitive infrastructure, including identity, certificates, secrets management, mTLS, policy enforcement, or compliance-driven environments. Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, conference presentations, or other forms of technical thought leadership in relevant domains. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: Today, enterprises stitch together separate systems for streaming, analytics, and serving. Each of these systems come with its own latency, cost, and operational overhead. The next evolution of Confluent's platform collapses that complexity by continuously materializing streaming data into fast, queryable state that serves real-time analytics, operational applications, and downstream intelligent systems from a single foundation. As a Staff Product Manager, you'll own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the core streaming analytics engine underlying Confluent's real-time data platform. This system sits at the intersection of stream processing, real-time analytical databases, and modern serving infrastructure, continuously transforming data in motion into low-latency, queryable materialized views that power AI agents, dashboards, operational queries, and event-driven applications. You'll own the engine: the storage, materialization, query layer, and performance, while partnering with peer product managers who own the downstream product experiences built on top of it. This is a foundational, high-leverage role. You'll define a new product category that brings together concepts from streaming analytics, real-time OLAP, materialized views, and modern database systems into a cloud-native, streaming-first architecture. You'll partner directly with engineering, design, and senior leadership to bring this to market and position Confluent as a compelling alternative to standalone real-time analytical databases. What You Will Do: Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience. Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative. Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics. Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale. Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it. Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning. Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud. Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area. Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership. Required Skills What You Will Bring: Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles. 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch. Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering. Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space. Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization. Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership. Preferred Skills Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems. Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user. Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure. Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery. Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models. Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
11/13/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: Today, enterprises stitch together separate systems for streaming, analytics, and serving. Each of these systems come with its own latency, cost, and operational overhead. The next evolution of Confluent's platform collapses that complexity by continuously materializing streaming data into fast, queryable state that serves real-time analytics, operational applications, and downstream intelligent systems from a single foundation. As a Staff Product Manager, you'll own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the core streaming analytics engine underlying Confluent's real-time data platform. This system sits at the intersection of stream processing, real-time analytical databases, and modern serving infrastructure, continuously transforming data in motion into low-latency, queryable materialized views that power AI agents, dashboards, operational queries, and event-driven applications. You'll own the engine: the storage, materialization, query layer, and performance, while partnering with peer product managers who own the downstream product experiences built on top of it. This is a foundational, high-leverage role. You'll define a new product category that brings together concepts from streaming analytics, real-time OLAP, materialized views, and modern database systems into a cloud-native, streaming-first architecture. You'll partner directly with engineering, design, and senior leadership to bring this to market and position Confluent as a compelling alternative to standalone real-time analytical databases. What You Will Do: Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience. Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative. Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics. Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale. Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it. Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning. Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud. Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area. Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership. Required Skills What You Will Bring: Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles. 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch. Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering. Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space. Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization. Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership. Preferred Skills Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems. Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user. Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure. Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery. Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models. Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: Today, enterprises stitch together separate systems for streaming, analytics, and serving. Each of these systems come with its own latency, cost, and operational overhead. The next evolution of Confluent's platform collapses that complexity by continuously materializing streaming data into fast, queryable state that serves real-time analytics, operational applications, and downstream intelligent systems from a single foundation. As a Staff Product Manager, you'll own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the core streaming analytics engine underlying Confluent's real-time data platform. This system sits at the intersection of stream processing, real-time analytical databases, and modern serving infrastructure, continuously transforming data in motion into low-latency, queryable materialized views that power AI agents, dashboards, operational queries, and event-driven applications. You'll own the engine: the storage, materialization, query layer, and performance, while partnering with peer product managers who own the downstream product experiences built on top of it. This is a foundational, high-leverage role. You'll define a new product category that brings together concepts from streaming analytics, real-time OLAP, materialized views, and modern database systems into a cloud-native, streaming-first architecture. You'll partner directly with engineering, design, and senior leadership to bring this to market and position Confluent as a compelling alternative to standalone real-time analytical databases. What You Will Do: Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience. Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative. Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics. Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale. Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it. Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning. Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud. Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area. Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership. Required Skills What You Will Bring: Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles. 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch. Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering. Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space. Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization. Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership. Preferred Skills Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems. Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user. Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure. Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery. Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models. Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
11/13/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: Today, enterprises stitch together separate systems for streaming, analytics, and serving. Each of these systems come with its own latency, cost, and operational overhead. The next evolution of Confluent's platform collapses that complexity by continuously materializing streaming data into fast, queryable state that serves real-time analytics, operational applications, and downstream intelligent systems from a single foundation. As a Staff Product Manager, you'll own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the core streaming analytics engine underlying Confluent's real-time data platform. This system sits at the intersection of stream processing, real-time analytical databases, and modern serving infrastructure, continuously transforming data in motion into low-latency, queryable materialized views that power AI agents, dashboards, operational queries, and event-driven applications. You'll own the engine: the storage, materialization, query layer, and performance, while partnering with peer product managers who own the downstream product experiences built on top of it. This is a foundational, high-leverage role. You'll define a new product category that brings together concepts from streaming analytics, real-time OLAP, materialized views, and modern database systems into a cloud-native, streaming-first architecture. You'll partner directly with engineering, design, and senior leadership to bring this to market and position Confluent as a compelling alternative to standalone real-time analytical databases. What You Will Do: Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience. Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative. Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics. Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale. Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it. Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning. Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud. Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area. Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership. Required Skills What You Will Bring: Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles. 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch. Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering. Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space. Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization. Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership. Preferred Skills Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems. Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user. Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure. Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery. Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models. Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world†s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You†ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM†s product and technology landscape. Here, you†ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: We are a team of passionate engineers who love solving complex distributed storage and query engine problems. Through the Tableflow and Lightning Tables project, we are building the next generation of storage and query solutions for Kora to enable streaming data to be consumed both as a table and as a stream seamlessly, and queried with the performance of a purpose-built analytical engine. As a Staff Software Engineer on the team, you will focus on advancing key layers of our system, including multi-tenant, highly available compute infrastructure, the core components responsible for table materialization and background maintenance, and the query engine that serves analytical workloads over that data. You will tackle challenges such as developing strategies for efficient table materialization and maintenance at massive scale across all of Confluent Cloud, building a fast and scalable query engine, and ensuring high availability and scalability for background storage tasks and query serving. What You Will Do: - Storage Engine Development: Design and implement innovative strategies for table schematization, materialization, and compaction at massive scale. - Query Engine Development: Design and implement components for query planning, execution, and optimization for fast analytical queries. - Platform Engineering: Build and maintain multi-tenant, highly available infrastructure that powers background computational tasks for Kora's long-term storage and query serving. Ensure that the platform is optimized for scalability, reliability, and resilience, in alignment with organizational objectives. - Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with product management, design, and other engineering teams to ensure seamless integration of storage and query features and infrastructure with the broader organization. Required Skills What You Will Bring: - BS, MS, or PhD in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience - Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence and guide stakeholders at all levels. Preferred Skills What Gives You an Edge: - Familiarity with or has experience contributing to the following open-source technologies: Apache Kafka, Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, Apache Fluss - Experience with query engines or distributed SQL systems (e.g. Presto/Trino, Spark SQL, DuckDB, ClickHouse) - Experience/knowledge with public clouds (AWS, Azure or GCP) Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
11/13/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world†s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You†ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM†s product and technology landscape. Here, you†ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: We are a team of passionate engineers who love solving complex distributed storage and query engine problems. Through the Tableflow and Lightning Tables project, we are building the next generation of storage and query solutions for Kora to enable streaming data to be consumed both as a table and as a stream seamlessly, and queried with the performance of a purpose-built analytical engine. As a Staff Software Engineer on the team, you will focus on advancing key layers of our system, including multi-tenant, highly available compute infrastructure, the core components responsible for table materialization and background maintenance, and the query engine that serves analytical workloads over that data. You will tackle challenges such as developing strategies for efficient table materialization and maintenance at massive scale across all of Confluent Cloud, building a fast and scalable query engine, and ensuring high availability and scalability for background storage tasks and query serving. What You Will Do: - Storage Engine Development: Design and implement innovative strategies for table schematization, materialization, and compaction at massive scale. - Query Engine Development: Design and implement components for query planning, execution, and optimization for fast analytical queries. - Platform Engineering: Build and maintain multi-tenant, highly available infrastructure that powers background computational tasks for Kora's long-term storage and query serving. Ensure that the platform is optimized for scalability, reliability, and resilience, in alignment with organizational objectives. - Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with product management, design, and other engineering teams to ensure seamless integration of storage and query features and infrastructure with the broader organization. Required Skills What You Will Bring: - BS, MS, or PhD in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience - Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence and guide stakeholders at all levels. Preferred Skills What Gives You an Edge: - Familiarity with or has experience contributing to the following open-source technologies: Apache Kafka, Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, Apache Fluss - Experience with query engines or distributed SQL systems (e.g. Presto/Trino, Spark SQL, DuckDB, ClickHouse) - Experience/knowledge with public clouds (AWS, Azure or GCP) Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world†s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You†ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM†s product and technology landscape. Here, you†ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: We are a team of passionate engineers who love solving complex distributed storage and query engine problems. Through the Tableflow and Lightning Tables project, we are building the next generation of storage and query solutions for Kora to enable streaming data to be consumed both as a table and as a stream seamlessly, and queried with the performance of a purpose-built analytical engine. As a Staff Software Engineer on the team, you will focus on advancing key layers of our system, including multi-tenant, highly available compute infrastructure, the core components responsible for table materialization and background maintenance, and the query engine that serves analytical workloads over that data. You will tackle challenges such as developing strategies for efficient table materialization and maintenance at massive scale across all of Confluent Cloud, building a fast and scalable query engine, and ensuring high availability and scalability for background storage tasks and query serving. What You Will Do: - Storage Engine Development: Design and implement innovative strategies for table schematization, materialization, and compaction at massive scale. - Query Engine Development: Design and implement components for query planning, execution, and optimization for fast analytical queries. - Platform Engineering: Build and maintain multi-tenant, highly available infrastructure that powers background computational tasks for Kora's long-term storage and query serving. Ensure that the platform is optimized for scalability, reliability, and resilience, in alignment with organizational objectives. - Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with product management, design, and other engineering teams to ensure seamless integration of storage and query features and infrastructure with the broader organization. Required Skills What You Will Bring: - BS, MS, or PhD in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience - Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence and guide stakeholders at all levels. Preferred Skills What Gives You an Edge: - Familiarity with or has experience contributing to the following open-source technologies: Apache Kafka, Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, Apache Fluss - Experience with query engines or distributed SQL systems (e.g. Presto/Trino, Spark SQL, DuckDB, ClickHouse) - Experience/knowledge with public clouds (AWS, Azure or GCP) Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
11/13/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world†s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You†ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM†s product and technology landscape. Here, you†ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: We are a team of passionate engineers who love solving complex distributed storage and query engine problems. Through the Tableflow and Lightning Tables project, we are building the next generation of storage and query solutions for Kora to enable streaming data to be consumed both as a table and as a stream seamlessly, and queried with the performance of a purpose-built analytical engine. As a Staff Software Engineer on the team, you will focus on advancing key layers of our system, including multi-tenant, highly available compute infrastructure, the core components responsible for table materialization and background maintenance, and the query engine that serves analytical workloads over that data. You will tackle challenges such as developing strategies for efficient table materialization and maintenance at massive scale across all of Confluent Cloud, building a fast and scalable query engine, and ensuring high availability and scalability for background storage tasks and query serving. What You Will Do: - Storage Engine Development: Design and implement innovative strategies for table schematization, materialization, and compaction at massive scale. - Query Engine Development: Design and implement components for query planning, execution, and optimization for fast analytical queries. - Platform Engineering: Build and maintain multi-tenant, highly available infrastructure that powers background computational tasks for Kora's long-term storage and query serving. Ensure that the platform is optimized for scalability, reliability, and resilience, in alignment with organizational objectives. - Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with product management, design, and other engineering teams to ensure seamless integration of storage and query features and infrastructure with the broader organization. Required Skills What You Will Bring: - BS, MS, or PhD in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience - Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence and guide stakeholders at all levels. Preferred Skills What Gives You an Edge: - Familiarity with or has experience contributing to the following open-source technologies: Apache Kafka, Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, Apache Fluss - Experience with query engines or distributed SQL systems (e.g. Presto/Trino, Spark SQL, DuckDB, ClickHouse) - Experience/knowledge with public clouds (AWS, Azure or GCP) Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud. In this role, you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform. You'll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and cross-team leadership, identifying high-leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact. What You Will Do Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models) that support Confluent Cloud products. Lead open-ended technical initiatives by taking ambiguous problems, clarifying requirements, defining the approach, and driving execution across teams and services. Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout and rollback patterns. Collaborate across organizations, including Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and others, to align on designs, trade-offs, and long-term platform direction. Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team. Continuously improve the developer experience for our control-plane stack through tooling, automation, CI/CD, and test strategy enhancements that reduce toil and increase velocity. Influence technical strategy within your domain by identifying high-impact opportunities, proposing roadmaps, and helping prioritize work aligned with business goals. Contribute to engineering culture through documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing, including internal talks, wikis, and external content where appropriate. Required Skills Experienced builder: Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production. Distributed systems & cloud expert: Deep hands-on experience with one or more of the following: Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, and scalability). Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native architectures. Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms. Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation. Architect and executor: Ability to define end-to-end designs, break work into milestones, de-risk early, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule. Operationally rigorous: Strong understanding of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response, with a focus on designing for safe change and graceful degradation. Great communicator: Ability to write clear design documents, articulate trade-offs effectively, and lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, product managers, and leadership. Leader without authority: Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction beyond immediate ownership, and helping other engineers grow and succeed. Values-aligned: Committed to customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and team success, with a focus on building durable solutions rather than simply shipping features. Preferred Skills Experience building control-plane systems, including APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, and provisioning or orchestration workflows. Background working with Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems. Experience designing and operating multi-region, high-availability, or disaster recovery architectures. Experience working on security-sensitive infrastructure, including identity, certificates, secrets management, mTLS, policy enforcement, or compliance-driven environments. Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, conference presentations, or other forms of technical thought leadership in relevant domains. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
11/13/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud. In this role, you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform. You'll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and cross-team leadership, identifying high-leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact. What You Will Do Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models) that support Confluent Cloud products. Lead open-ended technical initiatives by taking ambiguous problems, clarifying requirements, defining the approach, and driving execution across teams and services. Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout and rollback patterns. Collaborate across organizations, including Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and others, to align on designs, trade-offs, and long-term platform direction. Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team. Continuously improve the developer experience for our control-plane stack through tooling, automation, CI/CD, and test strategy enhancements that reduce toil and increase velocity. Influence technical strategy within your domain by identifying high-impact opportunities, proposing roadmaps, and helping prioritize work aligned with business goals. Contribute to engineering culture through documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing, including internal talks, wikis, and external content where appropriate. Required Skills Experienced builder: Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production. Distributed systems & cloud expert: Deep hands-on experience with one or more of the following: Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, and scalability). Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native architectures. Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms. Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation. Architect and executor: Ability to define end-to-end designs, break work into milestones, de-risk early, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule. Operationally rigorous: Strong understanding of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response, with a focus on designing for safe change and graceful degradation. Great communicator: Ability to write clear design documents, articulate trade-offs effectively, and lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, product managers, and leadership. Leader without authority: Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction beyond immediate ownership, and helping other engineers grow and succeed. Values-aligned: Committed to customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and team success, with a focus on building durable solutions rather than simply shipping features. Preferred Skills Experience building control-plane systems, including APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, and provisioning or orchestration workflows. Background working with Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems. Experience designing and operating multi-region, high-availability, or disaster recovery architectures. Experience working on security-sensitive infrastructure, including identity, certificates, secrets management, mTLS, policy enforcement, or compliance-driven environments. Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, conference presentations, or other forms of technical thought leadership in relevant domains. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: Today, enterprises stitch together separate systems for streaming, analytics, and serving. Each of these systems come with its own latency, cost, and operational overhead. The next evolution of Confluent's platform collapses that complexity by continuously materializing streaming data into fast, queryable state that serves real-time analytics, operational applications, and downstream intelligent systems from a single foundation. As a Staff Product Manager, you'll own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the core streaming analytics engine underlying Confluent's real-time data platform. This system sits at the intersection of stream processing, real-time analytical databases, and modern serving infrastructure, continuously transforming data in motion into low-latency, queryable materialized views that power AI agents, dashboards, operational queries, and event-driven applications. You'll own the engine: the storage, materialization, query layer, and performance, while partnering with peer product managers who own the downstream product experiences built on top of it. This is a foundational, high-leverage role. You'll define a new product category that brings together concepts from streaming analytics, real-time OLAP, materialized views, and modern database systems into a cloud-native, streaming-first architecture. You'll partner directly with engineering, design, and senior leadership to bring this to market and position Confluent as a compelling alternative to standalone real-time analytical databases. What You Will Do: Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience. Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative. Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics. Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale. Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it. Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning. Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud. Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area. Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership. Required Skills What You Will Bring: Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles. 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch. Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering. Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space. Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization. Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership. Preferred Skills Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems. Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user. Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure. Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery. Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models. Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
11/13/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: Today, enterprises stitch together separate systems for streaming, analytics, and serving. Each of these systems come with its own latency, cost, and operational overhead. The next evolution of Confluent's platform collapses that complexity by continuously materializing streaming data into fast, queryable state that serves real-time analytics, operational applications, and downstream intelligent systems from a single foundation. As a Staff Product Manager, you'll own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the core streaming analytics engine underlying Confluent's real-time data platform. This system sits at the intersection of stream processing, real-time analytical databases, and modern serving infrastructure, continuously transforming data in motion into low-latency, queryable materialized views that power AI agents, dashboards, operational queries, and event-driven applications. You'll own the engine: the storage, materialization, query layer, and performance, while partnering with peer product managers who own the downstream product experiences built on top of it. This is a foundational, high-leverage role. You'll define a new product category that brings together concepts from streaming analytics, real-time OLAP, materialized views, and modern database systems into a cloud-native, streaming-first architecture. You'll partner directly with engineering, design, and senior leadership to bring this to market and position Confluent as a compelling alternative to standalone real-time analytical databases. What You Will Do: Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience. Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative. Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics. Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale. Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it. Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning. Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud. Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area. Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership. Required Skills What You Will Bring: Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles. 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch. Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering. Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space. Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization. Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership. Preferred Skills Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems. Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user. Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure. Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery. Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models. Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud. In this role, you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform. You'll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and cross-team leadership, identifying high-leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact. What You Will Do Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models) that support Confluent Cloud products. Lead open-ended technical initiatives by taking ambiguous problems, clarifying requirements, defining the approach, and driving execution across teams and services. Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout and rollback patterns. Collaborate across organizations, including Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and others, to align on designs, trade-offs, and long-term platform direction. Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team. Continuously improve the developer experience for our control-plane stack through tooling, automation, CI/CD, and test strategy enhancements that reduce toil and increase velocity. Influence technical strategy within your domain by identifying high-impact opportunities, proposing roadmaps, and helping prioritize work aligned with business goals. Contribute to engineering culture through documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing, including internal talks, wikis, and external content where appropriate. Required Skills Experienced builder: Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production. Distributed systems & cloud expert: Deep hands-on experience with one or more of the following: Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, and scalability). Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native architectures. Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms. Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation. Architect and executor: Ability to define end-to-end designs, break work into milestones, de-risk early, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule. Operationally rigorous: Strong understanding of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response, with a focus on designing for safe change and graceful degradation. Great communicator: Ability to write clear design documents, articulate trade-offs effectively, and lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, product managers, and leadership. Leader without authority: Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction beyond immediate ownership, and helping other engineers grow and succeed. Values-aligned: Committed to customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and team success, with a focus on building durable solutions rather than simply shipping features. Preferred Skills Experience building control-plane systems, including APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, and provisioning or orchestration workflows. Background working with Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems. Experience designing and operating multi-region, high-availability, or disaster recovery architectures. Experience working on security-sensitive infrastructure, including identity, certificates, secrets management, mTLS, policy enforcement, or compliance-driven environments. Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, conference presentations, or other forms of technical thought leadership in relevant domains. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
11/13/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud. In this role, you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform. You'll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and cross-team leadership, identifying high-leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact. What You Will Do Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models) that support Confluent Cloud products. Lead open-ended technical initiatives by taking ambiguous problems, clarifying requirements, defining the approach, and driving execution across teams and services. Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout and rollback patterns. Collaborate across organizations, including Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and others, to align on designs, trade-offs, and long-term platform direction. Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team. Continuously improve the developer experience for our control-plane stack through tooling, automation, CI/CD, and test strategy enhancements that reduce toil and increase velocity. Influence technical strategy within your domain by identifying high-impact opportunities, proposing roadmaps, and helping prioritize work aligned with business goals. Contribute to engineering culture through documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing, including internal talks, wikis, and external content where appropriate. Required Skills Experienced builder: Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production. Distributed systems & cloud expert: Deep hands-on experience with one or more of the following: Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, and scalability). Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native architectures. Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms. Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation. Architect and executor: Ability to define end-to-end designs, break work into milestones, de-risk early, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule. Operationally rigorous: Strong understanding of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response, with a focus on designing for safe change and graceful degradation. Great communicator: Ability to write clear design documents, articulate trade-offs effectively, and lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, product managers, and leadership. Leader without authority: Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction beyond immediate ownership, and helping other engineers grow and succeed. Values-aligned: Committed to customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and team success, with a focus on building durable solutions rather than simply shipping features. Preferred Skills Experience building control-plane systems, including APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, and provisioning or orchestration workflows. Background working with Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems. Experience designing and operating multi-region, high-availability, or disaster recovery architectures. Experience working on security-sensitive infrastructure, including identity, certificates, secrets management, mTLS, policy enforcement, or compliance-driven environments. Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, conference presentations, or other forms of technical thought leadership in relevant domains. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world†s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You†ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM†s product and technology landscape. Here, you†ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: We are a team of passionate engineers who love solving complex distributed storage and query engine problems. Through the Tableflow and Lightning Tables project, we are building the next generation of storage and query solutions for Kora to enable streaming data to be consumed both as a table and as a stream seamlessly, and queried with the performance of a purpose-built analytical engine. As a Staff Software Engineer on the team, you will focus on advancing key layers of our system, including multi-tenant, highly available compute infrastructure, the core components responsible for table materialization and background maintenance, and the query engine that serves analytical workloads over that data. You will tackle challenges such as developing strategies for efficient table materialization and maintenance at massive scale across all of Confluent Cloud, building a fast and scalable query engine, and ensuring high availability and scalability for background storage tasks and query serving. What You Will Do: - Storage Engine Development: Design and implement innovative strategies for table schematization, materialization, and compaction at massive scale. - Query Engine Development: Design and implement components for query planning, execution, and optimization for fast analytical queries. - Platform Engineering: Build and maintain multi-tenant, highly available infrastructure that powers background computational tasks for Kora's long-term storage and query serving. Ensure that the platform is optimized for scalability, reliability, and resilience, in alignment with organizational objectives. - Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with product management, design, and other engineering teams to ensure seamless integration of storage and query features and infrastructure with the broader organization. Required Skills What You Will Bring: - BS, MS, or PhD in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience - Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence and guide stakeholders at all levels. Preferred Skills What Gives You an Edge: - Familiarity with or has experience contributing to the following open-source technologies: Apache Kafka, Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, Apache Fluss - Experience with query engines or distributed SQL systems (e.g. Presto/Trino, Spark SQL, DuckDB, ClickHouse) - Experience/knowledge with public clouds (AWS, Azure or GCP) Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
11/13/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world†s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You†ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM†s product and technology landscape. Here, you†ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: We are a team of passionate engineers who love solving complex distributed storage and query engine problems. Through the Tableflow and Lightning Tables project, we are building the next generation of storage and query solutions for Kora to enable streaming data to be consumed both as a table and as a stream seamlessly, and queried with the performance of a purpose-built analytical engine. As a Staff Software Engineer on the team, you will focus on advancing key layers of our system, including multi-tenant, highly available compute infrastructure, the core components responsible for table materialization and background maintenance, and the query engine that serves analytical workloads over that data. You will tackle challenges such as developing strategies for efficient table materialization and maintenance at massive scale across all of Confluent Cloud, building a fast and scalable query engine, and ensuring high availability and scalability for background storage tasks and query serving. What You Will Do: - Storage Engine Development: Design and implement innovative strategies for table schematization, materialization, and compaction at massive scale. - Query Engine Development: Design and implement components for query planning, execution, and optimization for fast analytical queries. - Platform Engineering: Build and maintain multi-tenant, highly available infrastructure that powers background computational tasks for Kora's long-term storage and query serving. Ensure that the platform is optimized for scalability, reliability, and resilience, in alignment with organizational objectives. - Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with product management, design, and other engineering teams to ensure seamless integration of storage and query features and infrastructure with the broader organization. Required Skills What You Will Bring: - BS, MS, or PhD in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience - Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence and guide stakeholders at all levels. Preferred Skills What Gives You an Edge: - Familiarity with or has experience contributing to the following open-source technologies: Apache Kafka, Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, Apache Fluss - Experience with query engines or distributed SQL systems (e.g. Presto/Trino, Spark SQL, DuckDB, ClickHouse) - Experience/knowledge with public clouds (AWS, Azure or GCP) Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: Today, enterprises stitch together separate systems for streaming, analytics, and serving. Each of these systems come with its own latency, cost, and operational overhead. The next evolution of Confluent's platform collapses that complexity by continuously materializing streaming data into fast, queryable state that serves real-time analytics, operational applications, and downstream intelligent systems from a single foundation. As a Staff Product Manager, you'll own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the core streaming analytics engine underlying Confluent's real-time data platform. This system sits at the intersection of stream processing, real-time analytical databases, and modern serving infrastructure, continuously transforming data in motion into low-latency, queryable materialized views that power AI agents, dashboards, operational queries, and event-driven applications. You'll own the engine: the storage, materialization, query layer, and performance, while partnering with peer product managers who own the downstream product experiences built on top of it. This is a foundational, high-leverage role. You'll define a new product category that brings together concepts from streaming analytics, real-time OLAP, materialized views, and modern database systems into a cloud-native, streaming-first architecture. You'll partner directly with engineering, design, and senior leadership to bring this to market and position Confluent as a compelling alternative to standalone real-time analytical databases. What You Will Do: Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience. Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative. Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics. Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale. Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it. Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning. Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud. Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area. Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership. Required Skills What You Will Bring: Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles. 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch. Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering. Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space. Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization. Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership. Preferred Skills Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems. Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user. Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure. Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery. Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models. Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
11/13/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: Today, enterprises stitch together separate systems for streaming, analytics, and serving. Each of these systems come with its own latency, cost, and operational overhead. The next evolution of Confluent's platform collapses that complexity by continuously materializing streaming data into fast, queryable state that serves real-time analytics, operational applications, and downstream intelligent systems from a single foundation. As a Staff Product Manager, you'll own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the core streaming analytics engine underlying Confluent's real-time data platform. This system sits at the intersection of stream processing, real-time analytical databases, and modern serving infrastructure, continuously transforming data in motion into low-latency, queryable materialized views that power AI agents, dashboards, operational queries, and event-driven applications. You'll own the engine: the storage, materialization, query layer, and performance, while partnering with peer product managers who own the downstream product experiences built on top of it. This is a foundational, high-leverage role. You'll define a new product category that brings together concepts from streaming analytics, real-time OLAP, materialized views, and modern database systems into a cloud-native, streaming-first architecture. You'll partner directly with engineering, design, and senior leadership to bring this to market and position Confluent as a compelling alternative to standalone real-time analytical databases. What You Will Do: Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience. Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative. Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics. Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale. Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it. Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning. Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud. Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area. Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership. Required Skills What You Will Bring: Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles. 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch. Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering. Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space. Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization. Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership. Preferred Skills Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems. Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user. Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure. Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery. Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models. Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud. In this role, you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform. You'll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and cross-team leadership, identifying high-leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact. What You Will Do Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models) that support Confluent Cloud products. Lead open-ended technical initiatives by taking ambiguous problems, clarifying requirements, defining the approach, and driving execution across teams and services. Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout and rollback patterns. Collaborate across organizations, including Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and others, to align on designs, trade-offs, and long-term platform direction. Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team. Continuously improve the developer experience for our control-plane stack through tooling, automation, CI/CD, and test strategy enhancements that reduce toil and increase velocity. Influence technical strategy within your domain by identifying high-impact opportunities, proposing roadmaps, and helping prioritize work aligned with business goals. Contribute to engineering culture through documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing, including internal talks, wikis, and external content where appropriate. Required Skills Experienced builder: Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production. Distributed systems & cloud expert: Deep hands-on experience with one or more of the following: Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, and scalability). Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native architectures. Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms. Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation. Architect and executor: Ability to define end-to-end designs, break work into milestones, de-risk early, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule. Operationally rigorous: Strong understanding of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response, with a focus on designing for safe change and graceful degradation. Great communicator: Ability to write clear design documents, articulate trade-offs effectively, and lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, product managers, and leadership. Leader without authority: Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction beyond immediate ownership, and helping other engineers grow and succeed. Values-aligned: Committed to customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and team success, with a focus on building durable solutions rather than simply shipping features. Preferred Skills Experience building control-plane systems, including APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, and provisioning or orchestration workflows. Background working with Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems. Experience designing and operating multi-region, high-availability, or disaster recovery architectures. Experience working on security-sensitive infrastructure, including identity, certificates, secrets management, mTLS, policy enforcement, or compliance-driven environments. Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, conference presentations, or other forms of technical thought leadership in relevant domains. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
11/13/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud. In this role, you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform. You'll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and cross-team leadership, identifying high-leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact. What You Will Do Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models) that support Confluent Cloud products. Lead open-ended technical initiatives by taking ambiguous problems, clarifying requirements, defining the approach, and driving execution across teams and services. Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout and rollback patterns. Collaborate across organizations, including Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and others, to align on designs, trade-offs, and long-term platform direction. Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team. Continuously improve the developer experience for our control-plane stack through tooling, automation, CI/CD, and test strategy enhancements that reduce toil and increase velocity. Influence technical strategy within your domain by identifying high-impact opportunities, proposing roadmaps, and helping prioritize work aligned with business goals. Contribute to engineering culture through documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing, including internal talks, wikis, and external content where appropriate. Required Skills Experienced builder: Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production. Distributed systems & cloud expert: Deep hands-on experience with one or more of the following: Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, and scalability). Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native architectures. Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms. Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation. Architect and executor: Ability to define end-to-end designs, break work into milestones, de-risk early, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule. Operationally rigorous: Strong understanding of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response, with a focus on designing for safe change and graceful degradation. Great communicator: Ability to write clear design documents, articulate trade-offs effectively, and lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, product managers, and leadership. Leader without authority: Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction beyond immediate ownership, and helping other engineers grow and succeed. Values-aligned: Committed to customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and team success, with a focus on building durable solutions rather than simply shipping features. Preferred Skills Experience building control-plane systems, including APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, and provisioning or orchestration workflows. Background working with Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems. Experience designing and operating multi-region, high-availability, or disaster recovery architectures. Experience working on security-sensitive infrastructure, including identity, certificates, secrets management, mTLS, policy enforcement, or compliance-driven environments. Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, conference presentations, or other forms of technical thought leadership in relevant domains. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: Today, enterprises stitch together separate systems for streaming, analytics, and serving. Each of these systems come with its own latency, cost, and operational overhead. The next evolution of Confluent's platform collapses that complexity by continuously materializing streaming data into fast, queryable state that serves real-time analytics, operational applications, and downstream intelligent systems from a single foundation. As a Staff Product Manager, you'll own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the core streaming analytics engine underlying Confluent's real-time data platform. This system sits at the intersection of stream processing, real-time analytical databases, and modern serving infrastructure, continuously transforming data in motion into low-latency, queryable materialized views that power AI agents, dashboards, operational queries, and event-driven applications. You'll own the engine: the storage, materialization, query layer, and performance, while partnering with peer product managers who own the downstream product experiences built on top of it. This is a foundational, high-leverage role. You'll define a new product category that brings together concepts from streaming analytics, real-time OLAP, materialized views, and modern database systems into a cloud-native, streaming-first architecture. You'll partner directly with engineering, design, and senior leadership to bring this to market and position Confluent as a compelling alternative to standalone real-time analytical databases. What You Will Do: Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience. Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative. Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics. Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale. Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it. Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning. Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud. Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area. Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership. Required Skills What You Will Bring: Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles. 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch. Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering. Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space. Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization. Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership. Preferred Skills Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems. Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user. Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure. Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery. Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models. Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
11/12/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: Today, enterprises stitch together separate systems for streaming, analytics, and serving. Each of these systems come with its own latency, cost, and operational overhead. The next evolution of Confluent's platform collapses that complexity by continuously materializing streaming data into fast, queryable state that serves real-time analytics, operational applications, and downstream intelligent systems from a single foundation. As a Staff Product Manager, you'll own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the core streaming analytics engine underlying Confluent's real-time data platform. This system sits at the intersection of stream processing, real-time analytical databases, and modern serving infrastructure, continuously transforming data in motion into low-latency, queryable materialized views that power AI agents, dashboards, operational queries, and event-driven applications. You'll own the engine: the storage, materialization, query layer, and performance, while partnering with peer product managers who own the downstream product experiences built on top of it. This is a foundational, high-leverage role. You'll define a new product category that brings together concepts from streaming analytics, real-time OLAP, materialized views, and modern database systems into a cloud-native, streaming-first architecture. You'll partner directly with engineering, design, and senior leadership to bring this to market and position Confluent as a compelling alternative to standalone real-time analytical databases. What You Will Do: Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience. Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative. Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics. Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale. Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it. Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning. Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud. Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area. Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership. Required Skills What You Will Bring: Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles. 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch. Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering. Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space. Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization. Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership. Preferred Skills Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems. Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user. Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure. Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery. Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models. Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud. In this role, you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform. You'll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and cross-team leadership, identifying high-leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact. What You Will Do Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models) that support Confluent Cloud products. Lead open-ended technical initiatives by taking ambiguous problems, clarifying requirements, defining the approach, and driving execution across teams and services. Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout and rollback patterns. Collaborate across organizations, including Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and others, to align on designs, trade-offs, and long-term platform direction. Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team. Continuously improve the developer experience for our control-plane stack through tooling, automation, CI/CD, and test strategy enhancements that reduce toil and increase velocity. Influence technical strategy within your domain by identifying high-impact opportunities, proposing roadmaps, and helping prioritize work aligned with business goals. Contribute to engineering culture through documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing, including internal talks, wikis, and external content where appropriate. Required Skills Experienced builder: Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production. Distributed systems & cloud expert: Deep hands-on experience with one or more of the following: Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, and scalability). Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native architectures. Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms. Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation. Architect and executor: Ability to define end-to-end designs, break work into milestones, de-risk early, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule. Operationally rigorous: Strong understanding of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response, with a focus on designing for safe change and graceful degradation. Great communicator: Ability to write clear design documents, articulate trade-offs effectively, and lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, product managers, and leadership. Leader without authority: Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction beyond immediate ownership, and helping other engineers grow and succeed. Values-aligned: Committed to customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and team success, with a focus on building durable solutions rather than simply shipping features. Preferred Skills Experience building control-plane systems, including APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, and provisioning or orchestration workflows. Background working with Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems. Experience designing and operating multi-region, high-availability, or disaster recovery architectures. Experience working on security-sensitive infrastructure, including identity, certificates, secrets management, mTLS, policy enforcement, or compliance-driven environments. Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, conference presentations, or other forms of technical thought leadership in relevant domains. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
11/12/2026
Full time
Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud. In this role, you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform. You'll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and cross-team leadership, identifying high-leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact. What You Will Do Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models) that support Confluent Cloud products. Lead open-ended technical initiatives by taking ambiguous problems, clarifying requirements, defining the approach, and driving execution across teams and services. Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout and rollback patterns. Collaborate across organizations, including Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and others, to align on designs, trade-offs, and long-term platform direction. Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team. Continuously improve the developer experience for our control-plane stack through tooling, automation, CI/CD, and test strategy enhancements that reduce toil and increase velocity. Influence technical strategy within your domain by identifying high-impact opportunities, proposing roadmaps, and helping prioritize work aligned with business goals. Contribute to engineering culture through documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing, including internal talks, wikis, and external content where appropriate. Required Skills Experienced builder: Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production. Distributed systems & cloud expert: Deep hands-on experience with one or more of the following: Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, and scalability). Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native architectures. Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms. Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation. Architect and executor: Ability to define end-to-end designs, break work into milestones, de-risk early, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule. Operationally rigorous: Strong understanding of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response, with a focus on designing for safe change and graceful degradation. Great communicator: Ability to write clear design documents, articulate trade-offs effectively, and lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, product managers, and leadership. Leader without authority: Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction beyond immediate ownership, and helping other engineers grow and succeed. Values-aligned: Committed to customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and team success, with a focus on building durable solutions rather than simply shipping features. Preferred Skills Experience building control-plane systems, including APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, and provisioning or orchestration workflows. Background working with Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems. Experience designing and operating multi-region, high-availability, or disaster recovery architectures. Experience working on security-sensitive infrastructure, including identity, certificates, secrets management, mTLS, policy enforcement, or compliance-driven environments. Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, conference presentations, or other forms of technical thought leadership in relevant domains. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
