Senior Engineering Manager - Experience Foundations - Confluent

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:

We're seeking a hands-on Senior Engineering Manager to join our Experience Foundations team. This team owns critical TEAR (Trusted Experiences Access & Revenue) domains including Security UI, Networking UI, and Billing UI, as well as the shared experience foundations infrastructure (formerly UIF/UI Foundations team).
You'll lead the evolution of our foundations infrastructure from UI-only support to serving the entire Experience organization which includes several other interfaces (API/CLI/TF/VSCode/MCP). Along with this you will help establish patterns and best practices that enable UI engineers to confidently develop security and networking features across our application portfolio—including Governance, Flink, Kafka, Connect, and Tableflow.
In this role, you'll also support the evolution of Networking, Security, and Billing UI experiences, especially as we adopt and integrate the latest and greatest technologies in these domains. As cloud providers introduce new networking capabilities, security standards evolve, and billing models become more sophisticated, you'll ensure our UI stays at the forefront—providing intuitive, scalable interfaces that make complex technical capabilities accessible to our customers.
The Experience Foundations team owns several critical pillars:
Security: User authentication, authorization, and security experiences (RBAC, BYOK, SSO, API keys, encryption management)
Networking: Network configuration and connectivity interfaces (private networking, VPC peering, Private Link across AWS, GCP, Azure)
Billing UI: Revenue-critical billing and payment experiences (subscription models, multi-month commits, promotional offers, chargebacks, usage tracking
Experience Foundations Infrastructure: Shared UI/UX infrastructure and tooling (formerly UIF/UI Foundations), this includes our design system, compliance support, experience performance, accessibility and more.
These capabilities sit at the intersection of trust, infrastructure control, and revenue generation—foundational pillars that support our entire application ecosystem across Governance, Flink, Kafka, Connect, Tableflow, and future products.
What You Will Do: Technical Leadership & Engineering Excellence
Establish clear, reusable patterns and best practices for UI engineers developing security and networking code
Elevate the impact of all UI engineers across multiple product teams (Governance, Flink, Kafka, Connect, Tableflow)
Take a depth-first, hands-on approach to understanding systems and unblocking teams
Go deep in domain areas—understand the technical intricacies of networking protocols, security models, and billing systems to make sound architectural decisions
Drive the evolution of Experience Foundations infrastructure from UI-only to supporting the entire Experience organization, partner with the existing Engineering Manager to shape and execute the foundations roadmap
Cross-Functional Partnership
Own PM and Design partnerships for Security, Networking, and Billing domains
Ensure smooth execution and delivery of product initiatives across these verticals
Bridge technical and product perspectives to drive aligned outcomes
Translate domain complexity into clear execution plans
Challenge product specs when necessary to ensure technical feasibility
Partner with product teams across the portfolio to ensure patterns meet their needs
Communicate progress, risks, and trade-offs transparently to senior leadership

Team & People Management:

Collaborate with existing engineering leadership to build cohesive team strategy, including existing manager in the foundations space as your direct report
Mentor and develop engineers across multiple disciplines and experience levels
Foster a culture of ownership, excellence, and continuous improvement
Create leverage by empowering engineers with patterns, tools, and knowledge
Build strong connections between Experience Foundations and application teams
Champion developer productivity through AI tooling adoption, test automation, and improved engineering processes
Your work will enable UX engineers across our entire application portfolio to build consistent, high-quality security and networking experiences. By establishing clear patterns and evolving our foundations infrastructure, you'll multiply the impact of every engineer working on Governance, Flink, Kafka, Connect, Tableflow, and future products—while supporting the foundational pillars that drive over 70% of Confluent's revenue.
If you're energized by the challenge of transforming foundations infrastructure while elevating engineering capabilities across critical product domains, we'd love to talk.
Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
None
Required technical and professional expertise
5+ years of experience leading software engineering teams
Strong hands-on technical background with ability to dive deep into complex systems
Deep frontend engineering expertise: Strong understanding of modern web development (React, TypeScript, component design systems)
Proven ability to distill complex technical domains into clear patterns and best practices
Experience creating reusable patterns/frameworks adopted across multiple teams or products
Track record of elevating team capabilities through mentorship and knowledge sharing
Demonstrated success partnering with Product and Design to drive execution
Experience managing or collaborating closely with other engineering managers
Experience managing multiple product areas or technical domains simultaneously
Preferred technical and professional experience
Experience managing managers or leading leaders
Domain knowledge in at least one TEAR area: Security (RBAC, SSO, BYOK, encryption), Networking (VPC, Private Link, routing), or Billing/Payments (subscription models, usage tracking)
Experience evolving platform teams to serve broader organizational needs
Proficient with or highly curious about AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, etc.)
Track record of driving developer productivity improvements through tooling, automation, or process innovation

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT:

IBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence—from machine learning to generative AI—to help make organizations more responsive, productive, and resilient. IBM Software helps clients put AI into action now to create real value with trust, speed, and confidence across digital labor, IT automation, application modernization, security, and sustainability. Critical to this is the ability to make use of all data, because AI is only as good as the data that fuels it. In most organizations data is spread across multiple clouds, on premises, in private datacenters, and at the edge. IBM’s AI and data platform scales and accelerates the impact of AI with trusted data, and provides leading capabilities to train, tune and deploy AI across business. IBM’s hybrid cloud platform is one of the most comprehensive and consistent approach to development, security, and operations across hybrid environments—a flexible foundation for leveraging data, wherever it resides, to extend AI deep into a business.
YOUR LIFE @ IBM
In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.
Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.
Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.
Are you ready to be an IBMer?
ABOUT IBM
IBM’s greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.
Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we’re also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.
At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it’s time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.
IBM is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILS:

IBM 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.
  Job Title
  Senior Engineering Manager (Remote)
  Date posted
  13-Jul-2026
  Job ID
  123328
  City / Township / Village
  POUGHKEEPSIE, LOWELL, ROCHESTER, TUCSON, RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, Armonk, Boston, Bellevue, Atlanta, San Jose, Dallas, Austin, San Francisco, Seattle
  State / Province
  Georgia, Minnesota, Texas, New York, North Carolina, Arizona, Washington, Massachusetts, California
  Country
  United States
  Work arrangement
  Remote
  Area of work
  Software Engineering
  Employment type
  Regular
  Contract type
  Regular

Projected Minimum Salary per year:

161,000.00

Projected Maximum Salary per year:

299,000.00
Position type
Professional
Travel required
Some travel may be required based on business demand
Company
(0147) International Business Machines Corporation
Shift
General (daytime)
Is this role a commissionable/sales incentive based position?
No
Application Info
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