Confluent Staff Software Engineer - Kafka

Location: Remote within the United States; listed locations include Poughkeepsie, Lowell, Rochester, Tucson, Research Triangle Park, Armonk, Boston, Bellevue, Atlanta, San Jose, Dallas, Austin, San Francisco, and Seattle.

Salary: $161,000–$299,000 per year.

Company

IBM Software develops AI-powered, cloud-native, hybrid-cloud, and data-platform products for business and enterprise customers.

What you will do

• Develop Tableflow and Lightning Tables capabilities for Kora, enabling streaming data to be consumed and queried as both tables and streams.
• Design storage-engine strategies for table schematization, materialization, and compaction at massive scale.
• Build query-planning, execution, and optimization components for fast analytical workloads.
• Develop multi-tenant, highly available infrastructure for background computation, long-term storage, and query serving.
• Optimize systems for scalability, reliability, and resilience across Confluent Cloud.
• Collaborate with product management, design, and engineering teams to integrate storage, query, and infrastructure features.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s, master’s, or PhD degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• Ability to influence and guide stakeholders at all levels.
• Ability to work without current or future visa sponsorship.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with or contribution to Apache Kafka, Apache Iceberg, Apache Flink, or Apache Fluss.
• Experience with query engines or distributed SQL systems such as Presto/Trino, Spark SQL, DuckDB, or ClickHouse.
• Experience or knowledge with AWS, Azure, or GCP.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote work arrangement with a general daytime shift; some travel may be required based on business demand.
• Healthcare coverage including medical, prescription, dental, vision, and mental-health benefits.
• 401(k), pension plan, employee stock purchase plan, insurance, financial counseling, and potential performance-based salary incentives.
• Paid holidays, sick time, vacation, parental bonding leave, and other paid care leave under applicable policies.
• Access to AI-driven learning resources, certifications, employee resource groups, volunteering opportunities, and discounts.

Hiring process

• The position is expected to remain posted for 21 days from 28 October 2026 or less if no longer needed.
• Visa sponsorship is not provided now or in the future; applicants must already be able to work without sponsorship.