Senior Software Engineer - Confluent

IBM
IBM

Software Engineering

United Kingdom · Hursley, UK

Posted on Jun 25, 2026
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 responsibilities

About the Role:

As a Software Engineer, Cloud Control Plane, you will be designing and implementing a distributed control plane used by product teams to manage the lifecycle of their Confluent Cloud offerings.


We are a tightly knit group with a fairly mature Agile process running a very mild version of the XP playbook - we care a lot about clear communication, a good degree of task breakdown and a whole lot of pairing with other engineers. We pride ourselves in how we get stuff done - our process is light on red tape and heavy on collaboration - we will give you the authority and autonomy to make decisions.

What You Will Do:

  • Delve deep into the Kubernetes framework - we have K8S contributors working with us internally
  • Provision infrastructure using a mixture of Terraform and internal tooling and deploy your changes using Helm
  • Thrive working iteratively in a fast-paced Scrum environment where you'll use our product and be very much DevOps driven
  • You'll be expected to not only ship code but also operate and support it before and after release - that includes having a deep understanding of what your code will run on
Required education
None
Preferred education
None
Required technical and professional expertise
  • Strong software design and implementation skills in building infrastructure frameworks
  • Deep expertise in building distributed systems
  • Experience with one or more of these programming languages - Go, C++, Java, or Python
  • Experience in a full project lifecycle starting from zero lines of code to operating, observing and supporting a product as part of an on-call rota
  • Solid understanding of Kubernetes and Docker
Preferred technical and professional experience
  • Experience in building control planes (virtualization, software-defined networking/storage)
  • Experience building APIs - both RESTful and gRPC-based
  • Familiarity with infra such as networking, storage, and security in data centres
  • Hands-on experience with Kubernetes operators, Helm, or StatefulSets
  • Open source contributions to Kubernetes sigs or adjacent projects
  • Experience with PBT, TDD, and pair programming.

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 on-going 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 everyday 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 good 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

For additional information about location requirements, please discuss with the recruiter following submission of your application.

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