Staff Site Reliability Engineer - Confluent Incident Management & Reliability

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. With Confluent, data doesn’t sit still.

We put information in motion, streaming in near real time so organizations can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them.

Your Role And Responsibilities About the Role: Confluent Cloud processes millions of events per second across AWS, GCP, and Azure. When incidents happen in a multi-cloud streaming platform, they happen at scale—data in motion, exactly-once semantics, and cascading failure modes that require deep systems thinking. We need an expert-level engineer who can drive proactive reliability improvements that prevent these incidents before they occur.

This role combines hands-on technical work with strategic program ownership. You'll spend roughly 75% of your time on engineering: building automation, improving tooling, analyzing systemic failure patterns, and designing reliability improvements. The remaining 25% is teaching and coordination: coaching teams through post-mortems, training incident commanders, and evolving our incident response practices.

You'll be part of a global team with follow-the-sun coverage, with clean handoffs that keep everyone working sustainable hours. This role sits within Cloud Architecture and Reliability - Supportability, a horizontal team that owns reliability standards and tooling across engineering. You're the person who makes us need incident management less.

What You Will Do

  • Analyze systemic failure patterns and design reliability improvements that prevent incident recurrence
  • Own Rootly configuration, workflows, and integrations with PagerDuty, Jira, Confluence, and Slack
  • Define and maintain SLO/SLA frameworks; use error budgets to guide reliability investments
  • Own standards, practices, and continuous improvement of incident response across engineering
  • Edit and review customer-facing incident documents (CRCAs) to ensure quality and clarity
  • Develop and deliver training programs; coach teams through post-mortems
  • Partner with engineering leaders to elevate reliability practices org-wide
  • Deep experience with observability: metrics, logging, tracing
  • Kubernetes and container orchestration experience
  • Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and release processes
  • Strong written communication (design docs, runbooks, post-mortems)
  • Experience driving org-wide process and cultural changes
Preferred Education Master's Degree Required Technical And Professional Expertise
  • 10+ years of relevant experience in SRE, incident management, or reliability engineering
  • Cloud experience with at least one of AWS, GCP, or Azure (we run all three)
  • Experience navigating reliability/incident programs at 500+ engineer organizations
  • Deep expertise with incident management tooling (Rootly, PagerDuty, or similar)
  • Strong understanding of distributed systems and failure modes at scale
  • Kafka/event streaming expertise preferred, or demonstrated rapid mastery of complex systems
Preferred Technical And Professional Experience
  • Advanced Cloud Knowledge: Experience with cloud-based infrastructure and its application in reliability and resiliency engineering.
  • Specialized Scripting Skills: Proficiency in scripting languages and automation tools to optimize system reliability and performance.
Back to blog

Other Jobs To Apply

No other job posts for this day.

Common Interview Questions And Answers

1. HOW DO YOU PLAN YOUR DAY?

This is what this question poses: When do you focus and start working seriously? What are the hours you work optimally? Are you a night owl? A morning bird? Remote teams can be made up of people working on different shifts and around the world, so you won't necessarily be stuck in the 9-5 schedule if it's not for you...

2. HOW DO YOU USE THE DIFFERENT COMMUNICATION TOOLS IN DIFFERENT SITUATIONS?

When you're working on a remote team, there's no way to chat in the hallway between meetings or catch up on the latest project during an office carpool. Therefore, virtual communication will be absolutely essential to get your work done...

3. WHAT IS "WORKING REMOTE" REALLY FOR YOU?

Many people want to work remotely because of the flexibility it allows. You can work anywhere and at any time of the day...

4. WHAT DO YOU NEED IN YOUR PHYSICAL WORKSPACE TO SUCCEED IN YOUR WORK?

With this question, companies are looking to see what equipment they may need to provide you with and to verify how aware you are of what remote working could mean for you physically and logistically...

5. HOW DO YOU PROCESS INFORMATION?

Several years ago, I was working in a team to plan a big event. My supervisor made us all work as a team before the big day. One of our activities has been to find out how each of us processes information...

6. HOW DO YOU MANAGE THE CALENDAR AND THE PROGRAM? WHICH APPLICATIONS / SYSTEM DO YOU USE?

Or you may receive even more specific questions, such as: What's on your calendar? Do you plan blocks of time to do certain types of work? Do you have an open calendar that everyone can see?...

7. HOW DO YOU ORGANIZE FILES, LINKS, AND TABS ON YOUR COMPUTER?

Just like your schedule, how you track files and other information is very important. After all, everything is digital!...

8. HOW TO PRIORITIZE WORK?

The day I watched Marie Forleo's film separating the important from the urgent, my life changed. Not all remote jobs start fast, but most of them are...

9. HOW DO YOU PREPARE FOR A MEETING AND PREPARE A MEETING? WHAT DO YOU SEE HAPPENING DURING THE MEETING?

Just as communication is essential when working remotely, so is organization. Because you won't have those opportunities in the elevator or a casual conversation in the lunchroom, you should take advantage of the little time you have in a video or phone conference...

10. HOW DO YOU USE TECHNOLOGY ON A DAILY BASIS, IN YOUR WORK AND FOR YOUR PLEASURE?

This is a great question because it shows your comfort level with technology, which is very important for a remote worker because you will be working with technology over time...