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 runtime
● Own projects from design through rollout, including implementation, testing, documentation, operational readiness, and follow-up
● Break down complex problems into clear milestones and deliver high-quality results with strong engineering judgment
● Improve the reliability, maintainability, scalability, and performance of our cloud-native SQL stack for both batch and streaming workloads
● Write clear design docs and contribute to technical discussions that help the team make practical, well-informed decisions
● Strengthen production readiness through better observability, automation, tooling, and incident follow-up
● Reduce technical debt and improve the long-term health of the systems and developer workflows owned by the team
● Work closely with product and peer engineering teams to turn customer and product needs into practical technical solutions
● Contribute to open source Apache Flink where it makes sense and collaborate with the broader community on overlapping work
● Help other engineers through thoughtful code reviews, design feedback, knowledge sharing, and day-to-day mentoring
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Bachelor's degree and 5–7+ years building backend services, data infrastructure, or distributed systems. Requires Java or another JVM language, SQL, cloud operations, and production ownership.
Key Responsibilities
- designing components
- improving reliability
- mentoring engineers
Skills & Tools
Java, Scala, SQL, AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, Apache Flink SQL, Apache Flink, Table API, Spark SQL, Trino, Apache Calcite, Apache Kafka, Schema Registry, Avro, Protobuf
Job Details
- Category: Software Development
- Seniority: Senior Level
- Commitment: Full Time
- Workplace: Remote — Ehningen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
- Languages: English
Benefits
- Generous paid time off
About IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH
A technology company developing software, hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence, and data platforms. — Industry: Information Technology