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 ResponsibilitiesAbout the Role

The Confluent Platform Management and Control Center team builds the experiences and services that help customers operate Kafka and Confluent Platform reliably across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will work across Unified Stream Manager (USM) and Confluent Control Center (C3) to make platform management, observability simpler and more dependable for enterprise customers. USM is the strategic, hybrid-first control plane for managing and monitoring Confluent Platform across environments. C3 remains an important local control plane for customers operating in non-hybrid, sovereign, regulated, or air-gapped environments. You will own complex engineering problems from design through production, partnering with engineers, product managers, designers, and teams across Confluent. Your work will help customers manage clusters, connectors, topics, and streaming workloads with greater visibility, confidence, and operational control. This role is a strong fit for an engineer who enjoys working across distributed systems and product surfaces, solving ambiguous problems, and building software that is reliable under real-world production conditions.

What You Will Do

- Design, implement, test, and operate reliable services and product experiences for USM and Control Center.
- Own complex projects end to end: clarify the problem, contribute to technical design, break work into milestones, execute with partner teams, and validate the result in production.
- Build management and observability capabilities for Kafka and Confluent Platform across cloud, on-premises, hybrid, multi-cluster, and multi-geography environments.
- Contribute to USM capabilities that provide consistent management, monitoring, security, and operational workflows across environments.
- Improve C3 workflows for customers who require a local control plane, including cluster health, topic and message operations, connector troubleshooting, and other critical day-two workflows.
- Write clear design documents, participate in architecture and code reviews, and make pragmatic technical decisions that balance delivery speed, reliability, maintainability, and long-term architecture.
- Diagnose and resolve production issues using logs, metrics, traces, and systematic root-cause analysis; participate in on-call and operational readiness practices.
- Collaborate with product management, engineering, design, support, and Confluent Cloud teams to understand customer needs and deliver high-quality outcomes.
- Raise engineering quality through automated testing,



safe rollout practices, documentation, observability, and improvements to development and release processes.
- Provide technical guidance and constructive feedback to other engineers, helping the team grow through reviews, pairing, and hands-on collaboration.

Required Education

Bachelor's Degree

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical and Professional Expertise

- 5+ years of professional software development experience building and operating production systems.
- Strong programming and problem-solving skills in a language such as Java, Go, C/C++, or Python.
- Experience designing, implementing, and debugging distributed systems or backend services.
- A solid understanding of systems fundamentals, including networking, storage, operating systems, concurrency, and performance.
- Experience taking ownership of complex projects and delivering them with high quality and predictable execution.
- Experience writing technical designs and communicating trade-offs clearly with engineers and cross-functional partners.
- Strong engineering practices, including code reviews, automated testing, observability, documentation, and operational readiness.
- Ability to investigate complex technical issues, identify root causes, and drive durable fixes rather than short-term mitigations.
- Willingness to participate in on-call rotations and handle customer-impacting issues with urgency, patience, and sound judgment.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Technical and Professional Experience

- Experience with Apache Kafka, Kafka Connect, Confluent Platform, or other streaming and data infrastructure technologies.
- Experience building management, monitoring, observability, troubleshooting, or operational tooling for large-scale systems.
- Experience with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, hybrid architectures, or infrastructure automation.
- Familiarity with authorization, RBAC, security, auditability, or compliance requirements for enterprise platforms.
- Experience working on products that span cloud control planes and customer-managed or on-premises components.
- Contributions to open-source projects or interest in technical writing, presentations, and developer advocacy.

Years of Experience

5 - 15

About Business Unit

IBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence-from machine learning to generative AI-to help make organizations more responsive, productive, and resilient. IBM Software helps clients put AI into action now to create real value with trust, speed, and confidence across digital labor, IT automation, application modernization, security, and sustainability. Critical to this is the ability to make use of all data, because AI is only as good as the data that fuels it. In most organizations data is spread across multiple clouds, on premises, in private datacenters, and at the edge.



IBM's AI and data platform scales and accelerates the impact of AI with trusted data, and provides leading capabilities to train, tune and deploy AI across business. IBM's hybrid cloud platform is one of the most comprehensive and consistent approach to development, security, and operations across hybrid environments-a flexible foundation for leveraging data, wherever it resides, to extend AI deep into a business.

Your Life @ IBM

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you'll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you'll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide ongoing feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team-focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions every day is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome-focused approach within everything that they do.

Are you ready to be an IBMer?

About IBM

IBM's greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason, and science, we can improve business, society, and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, but we're also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.

At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and blockchain. Now it's time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for valuable in the world.

IBM is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

Other Relevant Job Details

When applying to jobs of your interest, we recommend that you do so for those that match your experience and expertise. Our recruiters advise that you apply to not more than 3 roles in a year for the best candidate experience. For additional information about location requirements, please discuss with the recruiter following submission of your application.

Locations: Bangalore, Karnataka, India

📌 Senior Software Engineer II (Bengaluru)
🏢 IBM
📍 Bengaluru