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 Connect Cloud Platform team owns the control plane that powers every connector running in Confluent Cloud, giving customers a reliable way to create, configure, and manage their connectors. The team also owns hybrid connector management, which extends this control plane so customers can manage on-prem Connect clusters from Confluent Cloud through a single pane of glass, and contributes to the ongoing architectural evolution of the control plane as Connect scales.

As an Engineering Manager II, you will own a team of senior and junior engineers building this control plane.

Correctness is paramount in this domain: the team is accountable for making sure every connector request is processed reliably and that customer intent is honored consistently, given the cost and compliance implications of getting it wrong. You will partner closely with product, peer engineering teams across Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform, and adjacent platform teams, to turn customer and product needs into a clear roadmap and a team that executes against it with a high bar for operational excellence.

What You Will Do

- Own execution for the Connect control plane, including connector lifecycle APIs and the underlying metadata and state management, while partnering on the hybrid connector management initiative that extends this ownership.
- Partner with product management, engineering leadership, and cross-functional stakeholders to define quarterly milestones and drive delivery of multi-quarter roadmap commitments.
- Break down complex, cross-team initiatives into meaningful milestones, surface dependencies and blockers early, and keep execution aligned to business priorities as requirements evolve.
- Lead a team of both senior and junior engineers, creating clarity on goals, providing regular coaching and feedback, and helping individuals grow in line with the career progression guide.
- Own the health of the team's on-call and operational practices, including incident response, root cause reviews, and reducing recurring operational toil, given the team sits directly in the path of every connector operation customers run.
- Represent the team in technical discussions, design reviews, and postmortems, and help raise the bar for architecture, execution, and engineering process across the broader Connect organization.
- Translate product asks and customer needs into engineering requirements and delivery plans that balance feature velocity, technical debt, reliability, and long-term architectural integrity.
- Build a healthy, inclusive,



high-trust team culture with psychological safety, solid engagement, and clear accountability.
- Partner with recruiting to attract, assess, and close strong engineering talent, while maintaining a high hiring bar and a strong candidate experience.

Required Education

- Bachelor's Degree

Preferred Education

- Master's Degree

Required Technical and Professional Expertise

- 8+ years of relevant software engineering experience and 2+ years of people management experience leading engineers in distributed systems, platform, or infrastructure focused teams.
- Strong technical depth in distributed systems, with the ability to weigh in credibly on API design, data consistency, and operational trade-offs.
- Experience delivering multi-quarter or cross-team initiatives with clear business impact, including managing dependencies, shifting priorities, and execution risk.
- Proven ability to lead through ambiguity, align teams around outcomes, and keep work moving even while strategy is still being refined.
- Demonstrated strength in coaching, feedback, performance management, and career development for engineers across different levels of seniority.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively across engineering, product, and other cross-functional partners.
- Experience hiring and building balanced, high-performing teams with strong attention to inclusion, team health, and long-term talent development.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Technical and Qualified Experience

- Experience with Apache Kafka, Kafka Connect, Confluent Platform, or adjacent streaming and data integration technologies.
- Experience owning control plane or management plane systems, including REST APIs and state management for distributed resources.
- Familiarity with Kubernetes, cloud native platforms, and hybrid deployment models spanning on-prem and cloud, across AWS, Azure, or GCP.
- Experience leading teams responsible for correctness-critical, customer-facing platform experiences, where request loss or state drift has direct customer and cost impact.
- Experience balancing roadmap delivery with reliability, on-call health, and operational excellence in a business-critical, customer-facing system.

Years of Experience

- 10 - 20

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 approaches 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 every day, 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, 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

📌 Manager II, Engineering - Confluent (India)
🏢 IBM
📍 India