Your role and responsibilities
About the Role:You'll help build Confluent Cloud's AI capabilities - the layer that lets customers bring AI and AI agents capabilities directly to their real-time data. Instead of moving data out to a separate system to run inference or build an agent, our customers do it in place, on streaming data, as part of the same platform they already use to move and process events at scale.
As an engineer, you'll own delivery of significant pieces of this product - not just writing code, but deciding how a capability should work across the services that make it up. The interesting problems here rarely live in one place: shipping something like inference-on-streaming-data or an AI agent that reacts to live events touches several systems at once - the user-facing API, the services that manage model and agent lifecycle, the control plane that schedules and runs the work, and the serving layer that actually executes inference. You'll be expected to reason across those boundaries, make sound design calls, and get engineers inside and outside the team aligned on the approach.
What You Will Do:- Design and build the backend services (primarily Go, Java, and Python) that run AI and model inference on real-time data.
- Own features end to end - drafting the design, aligning stakeholders inside and outside the team, and driving the decision to a conclusion.
- Make the technical calls on systems that span teams: model lifecycle, inference routing, and agent execution.
- Own the quality of what you ship - code, test coverage, documentation, operability, and rollout safety. This is production infrastructure serving live inference, so reliability isn't an afterthought.
- Make the engineers around you better through code review, design feedback, and being someone the team trusts with ambiguous, cross-cutting work.
- Participate in on-call for the services your team owns, and help keep the team's processes and rituals healthy.
Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
- 10+ years of significant experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems or cloud-native backend infrastructure in production
- .Strong working knowledge of Kubernetes and distributed-systems patterns (control loops, API servers, high-scale control planes), plus the fundamentals - containerization, networking, resource isolation.
- Proficiency in at least one of Go, Java, or Python, and the willingness to work across all three.
- A track record of leading cross-team technical work: turning ambiguous requirements into designs others can rally behind.
- Excellent written and verbal communication - you can write a design doc that aligns people who don't report to you.
Preferred technical and professional experience
Exposure to model serving, LLM/agent infrastructure, or streaming data systems.
- You don't need a background in ML research or model training - this role is about building and operating the platform that serves AI reliably at scale, not inventing the models.
OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILSIBM 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.
IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
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.
