Senior Business Systems Engineer, Metronome - Confluent

Introduction
At IBM Finance & Operations, we are the backbone of IBM’s transformation driving efficiency, transparency, and smart decision-making across the business. Our teams provide the insight and discipline that guide strategy, ensure financial strength, and enable IBM to invest in innovation and growth. Working in Finance & Operations means combining analytical skills with collaboration and curiosity. You’ll partner with colleagues across functions and geographies, using data, technology, and process excellence to create solutions that improve performance and deliver measurable impact. IBM offers continuous learning, career development, and a culture that values diverse perspectives. Join us and be part of a global team that keeps IBM moving forward, while building your own future in a dynamic and evolving environment.
Your Role And Responsibilities
About the Role
Confluent’s Business Systems team is looking for a Senior Business Systems Engineer to help engineer the systems that power a modern, consumption-based SaaS business. In this role, you will be a senior technical owner for the Metronome platform, responsible for configuring, designing, developing, testing, deploying, and debugging high-complexity improvements and enhancements.
You will work at the intersection of business process, software engineering, data, and enterprise architecture. You will partner closely with Finance, Sales, Deal Desk, Revenue Operations, Product, Engineering, Data, and other Business Systems teams to turn complex business needs into secure, scalable, and maintainable solutions.
This is a hands-on role for an engineer who can move comfortably from requirements and architecture to implementation, automated testing, production deployment, and root-cause analysis. You will have the opportunity to shape technical standards, improve platform reliability, and create reusable patterns that make the broader Business Systems organization more effective.
What You Will Do
Own the end-to-end delivery of high-complexity Metronome initiatives, from discovery and solution design through development, testing, deployment, and post-release stabilization.
Configure and extend Metronome to support evolving usage, pricing, rating, billing, entitlement, invoicing, and downstream financial processes.
Translate ambiguous business requirements into clear technical designs, implementation plans, delivery milestones, and measurable outcomes.
Design scalable, resilient integrations between Metronome and adjacent systems such as CRM, CPQ, ERP, data platforms, contract systems, and internal services.
Develop platform customizations, scripts, services, APIs, and automation using sound software engineering practices, including version control, code review, logging, error handling, and documentation.
Define and execute unit, integration, regression, performance, and user acceptance testing for complex system changes; partner with QA and business stakeholders to validate end-to-end outcomes.
Deploy changes through disciplined release and change-management practices, balancing speed, reliability, security, auditability, and operational readiness.
Diagnose and resolve complex production issues by tracing behavior across configurations, integrations, data flows, and dependent systems; identify root causes and implement durable fixes.
Establish reusable architecture patterns, development standards, runbooks, and observability practices that improve maintainability, release quality, and team velocity.
Anticipate downstream impacts, technical debt, and operational risks; recommend pragmatic tradeoffs and contingency plans before issues become escalations.
Lead cross-functional working sessions, communicate technical decisions to both technical and non-technical audiences, and build alignment when goals or solution paths are not obvious.
Mentor other Business Systems engineers and contribute to a culture of thoughtful design, knowledge sharing, continuous improvement, and high-quality delivery.
Preferred Education
Master's Degree
Required Technical And Professional Expertise
8+ years of experience in business systems engineering, software engineering, systems development, technical architecture, or a related field; equivalent practical experience is welcome.
Hands-on experience designing, configuring, developing, testing, and deploying complex SaaS business-system solutions.
Experience with Metronome or another usage-based billing, consumption management, metering, subscription billing, or revenue operations platform.
Strong understanding of API-first integration patterns, Python REST APIs, webhooks, JSON, data models, SQL, scripting, and event-driven or asynchronous system behavior.
Demonstrated ability to design solutions that are scalable, testable, observable, secure, and maintainable rather than optimized only for the immediate request.
Experience with modern software delivery practices, including Git-based development, code review, automated testing, CI/CD, release management, and production support.
Strong debugging and analytical skills, with the ability to isolate issues across configurations, code, integrations, data, and platform behavior.
Experience working in a controlled enterprise environment with access controls, audit trails, change management, data governance, and compliance considerations.
A track record of independently owning complex technical work, managing competing priorities, anticipating risks, and delivering against commitments with minimal supervision.
Strong communication and facilitation skills, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs clearly and build trust with business stakeholders, engineers, vendors, and senior leaders.
A collaborative, customer-focused mindset and a bias toward simplifying processes, removing manual work, and improving the experience of the teams who rely on Business Systems.
Preferred Technical And Professional Experience
Deep hands-on experience implementing or operating Metronome in a high-growth SaaS environment.
Experience integrating usage and billing platforms with Salesforce, CPQ, NetSuite or another ERP, contract lifecycle management systems, data warehouses, or revenue-recognition workflows.
Experience with consumption-based pricing, product catalog design, usage data quality, entitlements, invoicing, credits, collections, or revenue operations.
Experience designing resilient data pipelines and integrations that support high-volume usage events and financially significant business processes.
Familiarity with cloud platforms, infrastructure-as-code, observability tooling, and secure service-to-service integration.
Experience improving engineering standards, reusable frameworks, deployment automation, or developer productivity across multiple teams.
Experience in a public-company or similarly rigorous environment where reliability, auditability, and operational controls matter.
A thoughtful approach to AI-assisted development and automation, including sound judgment about where AI can accelerate delivery and where human review, testing, and controls are essential.

Work arrangement
Yes