Confluent - Principal Software Developer

Your Role and Responsibilities: As a Principal Software Engineer for the Cloud Architecture and Reliability (CAR) team, you will be a technical authority on ensuring our large-scale, multi-cloud data streaming platform stays up, recovers fast, and has the right operator tools to keep data flowing. You will work across all Confluent R&D teams to shape the architecture of the systems and our own tooling. As a lead engineer within the CAR team you will work with and through other team members to deliver on our mission.

Primary Responsibilities: *Resiliency: Partner with peer teams and other leaders in CAR to define the architectural patterns and standards that create systemic resiliency for Confluent Cloud. Help teams reason about how services, dependencies, and failure domains compose end to end. *Observability: Shape the architecture of a large-scale internal observability platform (metrics, logs, and traces) built on open standards such as OpenTelemetry and Prometheus. Make deliberate tradeoffs on cost, cardinality, signal attribution, and platform self-protection (quotas, rate limits, regional isolation), and make sure the platform itself is exceptionally reliable. *Agentic Operator Foundations: Design and build agent-consumable operational data, tooling, and guardrails for AI-assisted triage and remediation. Partner with Customers and Leadership: Serve as an engineering voice on reliability, resiliency, and observability requirements from regulated customers (for example financial services and public sector), and help translate regulatory and contractual expectations into engineering standards. Required SkillsDeep Expertise in Reliability Engineering: Proven track record of designing, operating, and improving highly available distributed systems at cloud scale, with a clear understanding of failure domains, recovery objectives (RTO/RPO), and graceful degradation. Systems-Level Thinking: Established ability to model how many services and teams interact, find the structure underneath the complexity, and turn that into standards, guardrails, and architecture that scale beyond a single team. Mastery of Observability Fundamentals: Expertise in metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and SLOs, including the economics and failure modes of telemetry platforms at high volume and cardinality. Technical Leadership: Demonstrated ability to set direction, influence senior engineers and leaders across organizations, and drive adoption of standards you do not directly enforce. Exceptional Written Communication: Ability to explain complex tradeoffs clearly, concisely, and with sound judgment. Hands-On Software Development: Strong coding and design skills in one or more languages with a record of delivering production tools and software. Preferred SkillsResiliency and Recovery Design: Experience with business continuity and disaster recovery for large cloud services, including failover automation, multi-region and active-active architectures, and continuous recovery testing. Open Source Observability Stack: Experience with Apache Druid, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus-compatible storage, Grafana, distributed tracing, etc. Regulated Environments: Familiarity with operational resilience regimes and frameworks such as DORA, FedRAMP, and SOC 2, and with translating them into engineering practice. Data Streaming and Distributed Systems: Experience with Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, or comparable platforms. AI-Assisted Operations: Experience building or evaluating agentic tooling for operations (for example MCP-based tools, automated triage, and automated remediation), with a skeptic's eye for quality and safety. Platform Economics: Experience reducing the cost of observability or infrastructure while improving capability.

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.