Senior Software Engineer II - Confluent Traffic Team at IBM
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC
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Jul 23, 2026
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC
Jul 25, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
This role sits on the Traffic team at Confluent, focused on the network data plane that handles all traffic flowing in and out of customer Kafka clusters on Confluent Cloud. Day-to-day work involves designing, building, and operating high-performance, large-scale distributed networking systems for containerized cloud workloads, with attention to performance, reliability, security, and cost. It suits engineers with substantial cloud infrastructure and networking experience.
Senior level · 5+ years · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 2 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The posting says 'software engineers, at various levels' — no specific seniority level is claimed in the title or framing, so advertised seniority is Unspecified. The 5+ years of cloud infrastructure/networking experience and the expectation of independently driving complex projects to production support a Senior classification.
The language requirement is 'Proficiency in C++, Go, Python, or other statically typed languages' — these are interchangeable options satisfying a single gate. C++, Go, and Python are captured as a mutual-alternatives group; the open-ended 'or other statically typed languages' is not emitted as a separate skill since no specific tool is named.
Similarly, 'AWS, Azure or GCP' is a single cloud-platform gate with three named interchangeable options; all three are captured as a mutual-alternatives group.
No work location is specified in the posting. The role is described in the context of IBM/Confluent Cloud infrastructure work but no city, state, or remote policy is stated — location fields are left blank.
Kafka appears in the narrative describing the product (Confluent Cloud Kafka clusters) rather than as a candidate skill requirement, so it is marked preferred rather than a hard gate.
Linux kernel networking is listed under Preferred; eBPF is explicitly called 'a huge plus' — both are preferred.
No compensation figures are provided in the posting.
Read the full posting
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