Senior Software Engineer - Streaming SQL

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 Senior Software Developer II on the Flink SQL team, you will design, build, and improve core parts of the SQL experience in Confluent Cloud. You will work on areas such as query planning, optimization, type systems, runtime behavior, and developer productivity for streaming SQL workloads. This is a hands-on senior engineering role for someone who can independently drive complex work end to end. You will own meaningful technical problems, ship production-quality solutions, and help improve the reliability, performance, and usability of the systems you work on. You will collaborate closely with engineers, product managers, and partner teams while growing your expertise in distributed systems and stream processing. What you will do Design and implement improvements to Flink SQL components such as the planner, parser, optimizer, type system, and runtimeOwn projects from design through rollout, including implementation, testing, documentation, operational readiness, and follow-upBreak down complex problems into clear milestones and deliver high-quality results with strong engineering judgmentImprove the reliability, maintainability, scalability, and performance of our cloud-native SQL stack for both batch and streaming workloadsWrite clear design docs and contribute to technical discussions that help the team make practical, well-informed decisionsStrengthen production readiness through better observability, automation, tooling, and incident follow-upReduce technical debt and improve the long-term health of the systems and developer workflows owned by the teamWork closely with product and peer engineering teams to turn customer and product needs into practical technical solutionsContribute to open source Apache Flink where it makes sense and collaborate with the broader community on overlapping workHelp other engineers through thoughtful code reviews, design feedback, knowledge sharing, and day-to-day mentoring Preferred Education Master's Degree Required Technical And Professional Expertise Experience and fundamentals: 5 - 7+ years of industry experience building backend services, data infrastructure, or distributed systems. Strong computer science fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, and a solid understanding of concurrency and distributed systems basics. Expertise in Java (preferred for this role) or another JVM language (for example, Scala), with the ability to contribute to a large, existing codebase. SQL And Data Processing A solid understanding of SQL and relational concepts, and genuine interest in how query engines work (parsing, planning, optimization, execution). Familiarity with data processing systems such as databases, query engines, or stream processors — through work experience, open source, or advanced coursework/projects. Cloud And Operations Experience running or operating services on at least one major public cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure); exposure to Kubernetes-based environments is a plus. Willingness to own your code in production, including metrics, dashboards, alerts, and on-call participation. Ways Of Working Ability to deliver well-scoped features end-to-end with high quality: clarify requirements, implement, test, and roll out safely, seeking input from senior engineers where needed. Clear, pragmatic communication and constructive participation in design discussions and code reviews. High bar for code quality and testing, and a willingness to iterate based on feedback. Preferred Technical And Professional Experience Experience with Apache Flink SQL or the Table API, or with another SQL engine or large-scale data processing system (for example, Spark SQL, Trino, or a database engine). Familiarity with query planners and optimizers, or compiler construction (Apache Calcite is a plus). Understanding of streaming semantics such as event time, watermarks, and CDC handling. Experience with Apache Kafka, Schema Registry, or serialization formats like Avro and Protobuf. Contributions to open-source projects in streaming, databases, or distributed systems, ideally including Flink or related components.