Staff Software Engineer II - Confluent

IBM Software builds AI-powered, cloud-native products that enable digital transformation across diverse industries. The software team emphasizes innovation, growth, and continuous learning, providing opportunities to work on global-impact solutions.

• Strong professional experience developing production software using Rust.
• Proven track record of delivering complex systems projects with large scope.
• Strong experience with distributed systems, backend infrastructure, cloud platforms, networking, storage, and databases.
• At least 4 years driving Staff-level or equivalent technical initiatives across multiple teams, systems, or components.
• Experience designing and implementing scalable, reliable, and high-performance software systems.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, system design, and engineering best practices.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through ambiguity, set technical direction, and align multiple teams around complex plans.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and enabling others to succeed in high-risk, high-impact projects.
• Clear and concise technical communication skills.
• Ability to influence technical decisions beyond the immediate team and drive engineering standards within the organization.
• Experience with Apache Kafka, streaming platforms, messaging systems, or other distributed data systems.
• Prior contributions to open source projects, especially systems software or infrastructure.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, networking, storage, or database technologies.
• Experience with performance optimization, observability, reliability engineering, and large-scale production systems.
• Prior experience as a committer, maintainer, or core contributor to an open source project.

• Drive complex technical projects with strong software engineering skills and architectural judgment.
• Design and develop high-performance systems using Rust focusing on scalability, reliability, maintainability, and operational excellence.
• Provide technical leadership, set direction, and influence architecture and engineering decisions across teams.
• Mentor senior engineers and help improve engineering practices, design principles, and software architecture.
• Maintain high standards of software quality, performance, reliability, and maintainability.
• Collaborate with engineering, product management, and other stakeholders to translate requirements into robust solutions.
• Drive operational excellence through reliability improvements, performance optimization, observability, and supportability.
• Contribute to technical design and architecture discussions, communicating complex concepts and trade-offs.
• Contribute to open source projects and communities, including Apache Kafka or other distributed systems projects.