Staff Software Engineer II - Confluent Secure Compute

IBM Software is dedicated to transforming client challenges into innovative solutions through AI-powered, cloud-native products. The Staff Software Engineer II will lead the development of a multi-tenant, cloud-native compute platform, focusing on secure execution and operational excellence in a distributed systems environment.

Responsibilities:

• Build and evolve the secure, multi-tenant compute substrate and isolation primitives that safely execute customer and internal workloads in a shared environment
• Design and evolve APIs that provide clear, safe abstractions for polyglot workloads (containers, functions, and services) with diverse performance and isolation needs
• Integrate the Secure Compute platform with core data and application services so that teams can onboard new workloads with minimal friction
• Implement and harden workload isolation, network policies, identity and access, and secure execution environments required to safely run customer-supplied code
• Drive operational excellence through rich observability, automated health checks, self-healing workflows, and robust rollout and rollback practices
• Define and drive the technical direction for Secure Compute, including platform architecture, runtime, and security for running trusted and untrusted workloads at scale
• Design and implement platform APIs and Kubernetes controllers/operators (primarily in Go) that power workload lifecycle, autoscaling, placement, and isolation for containers and serverless-style functions
• Partner with product and platform teams to shape and deliver the roadmap for Secure Compute, enabling new customer-facing features and internal platforms to build on a common compute substrate
• Deliver high-impact initiatives in areas such as workload scheduling, failure and disruption handling, private and public networking patterns, rollout strategies, and fleet-level resource management
• Lead technical design reviews and influence architecture across teams, ensuring Secure Compute primitives are easy to adopt, safe by default, and aligned with broader platform strategy
• Mentor and grow engineers on the team through design guidance, code reviews, pair programming, and sharing best practices for secure, reliable, operable platform development
• Own operational excellence for key Secure Compute services, including availability, reliability, SLOs, performance, on-call response, incident management, and disaster recovery

Requirements:

• 10+ years of experience delivering scalable backend or infrastructure software in production
• Proven track record of leading the delivery of large-scale, highly available, low-latency distributed systems
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes, including controller development, operator patterns, and preferably multi-region or multi-cluster architectures
• Strong proficiency in Go with experience building production-grade services and control planes
• Experience with multi-tenant platform architectures and security/isolation patterns (for example, namespaces, network policies, sandboxing, secrets and identity management), plus hands-on work with secure container runtimes and low-level Linux internals (for example, Kata Containers, Cloud Hypervisor, cgroups, namespaces, seccomp) and performance troubleshooting and tuning for containerized/virtualized workloads
• Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, and internal platform API design for service-to-service communication
• Hands-on experience with observability and operational practices (metrics, logs, traces, alerting, SLOs, rollout strategies, incident response)
• Experience with public cloud environments (such as AWS, GCP, Azure) and cloud‑provider integrations
• Demonstrated technical leadership and mentorship, including driving cross‑team alignment on architecture and execution
• Master's Degree
• Strong collaboration skills and history of working effectively with product, SRE/operations, security, and peer engineering teams
• A smart, humble, and empathetic attitude with a strong sense of ownership and teamwork
• Drive and excitement about building foundational cloud infrastructure in a fast‑paced, innovative environment