We’re not just building better tech. We’re rewriting how data moves and what the world can do with it. With Confluent, data doesn’t sit still. Our platform puts information in motion, streaming in near real-time so companies can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them.

It takes a certain kind of person to join this team. Those who ask hard questions, give honest feedback, and show up for each other. No egos, no solo acts. Just smart, curious humans pushing toward something bigger, together.

One Confluent. One Team. One Data Streaming Platform.

What You’ll Do

As an L3 Senior Software Engineer, you are a mostly self-sufficient team member who owns and drives well-scoped to moderately complex problems end-to-end in your product area and helps other engineers with specific tasks when needed. In this role you will:

• Design, implement, and maintain services that power catalog, publishing, distribution, and lifecycle management for connectors and other Kafka/Flink artifacts, within a well-defined portion of the Marketplace & Hub domain.

• Deliver large features independently and with high quality, including tests, logging, and error handling, contributing to bigger initiatives owned by the team.

• Build a solid understanding of the design and architecture of your product area (e.g., specific Marketplace/Hub services, data models, and APIs) and use that to make sound design and implementation choices.

• Participate actively in technical processes for your team: design/one-pager reviews, RFC/KIP discussions where relevant, and PR reviews, providing constructive feedback to peers.

• Improve performance, scalability, reliability, and security of Marketplace & Hub services through incremental changes: refactors, dependency upgrades, schema evolution, and automation of existing manual workflows.

• Take shared ownership of operational excellence by handling on-call responsibilities, following runbooks, performing production operations safely, and contributing to better monitoring, alerting, and incident remediation.

• Collaborate with engineers across teams (Kafka Connect, Partner Engineering, Security, Billing, UX) on well-scoped cross-team efforts, unblocking yourself and others as needed.

• Help maintain a high engineering bar on the team through good coding practices, thoughtful reviews, and reliable delivery on commitments.

What We’re Looking For

We’re looking for a mostly self-sufficient engineer who can own well-defined problems, understands the architecture of their area, and contributes to the team’s quality and reliability over time.

• Experience building and operating backend or platform services.

• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and multi-tenant service architectures, with experience delivering well-defined components/features in that context.

• Ability to understand and work within the design/architecture of your product area, asking for guidance when requirements or boundaries are unclear.

• Demonstrated ability to deliver sub-parts of larger features independently with high quality (tests, logging, monitoring, error handling) and to follow through from implementation to production rollout.

• Experience contributing to code reviews, design documents, and technical discussions, and providing constructive feedback to peers.

• Solid experience building and running services on major public clouds (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including:

  • Working with Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform or similar).

  • Performing production operations using runbooks and participating in on-call rotations.

• Strong coding skills in Java (preferred) or another modern systems language (Go, C/C++).

• Good understanding of core systems concepts (databases, caching, networking, security basics, operating systems).

• Collaborative, self-directed working style: you can unblock yourself by working with other engineers, communicate status clearly, and ask for help early when needed.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Who You Are

• Smart, humble, and empathetic, with a strong ownership mindset.

• Motivated by impact on customers, partners, and the OSS community, not just technology for its own sake.

• Collaborative and excited about team and company success; you unblock others and raise the bar around you.

• Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, evolving environment, making pragmatic trade-offs while maintaining high standards.

What Gives You an Edge

• Experience building or operating marketplaces, app stores, or platform ecosystems (e.g., developer portals, catalog/billing/entitlement systems).

• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka, Kafka Connect, or data streaming systems.

• Experience in open-source development or contributing to community-driven projects.

• Familiarity with security, compliance, or vulnerability management workflows in production services.

• Experience working with partner-facing or customer-facing platforms (e.g., billing, entitlements, onboarding, or self-service publishing workflows).

Ready to build what's next? Let’s get in motion.

Come As You Are

Belonging isn’t a perk here. It’s the baseline. We work across time zones and backgrounds, knowing the best ideas come from different perspectives. And we make space for everyone to lead, grow, and challenge what’s possible.

We’re proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. Employment decisions are based on job-related criteria, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other classification protected by law.

Privacy Statement

Confluent is an IBM subsidiary which has been acquired by IBM and will be integrated into the IBM organization. By proceeding with this application, you understand that Confluent will share your personal information with other IBM affiliates involved in your recruitment process, wherever these are located. More Information on how IBM protects your personal information, including the safeguards in case of cross-border data transfer, are available here.