Confluent - Staff Software Engineer - Infrastructure

IBM Software develops AI-powered, cloud-native products that help transform client challenges into business and technology solutions. The Staff Software Engineer will lead the architecture and development of Confluent's Secure Compute platform, building secure, multi-tenant infrastructure on Kubernetes across major public clouds. The role also involves technical leadership, mentoring, operational excellence, and ownership of scalable distributed systems.

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the technical direction for Secure Compute, including platform architecture, runtime capabilities, and security models for running trusted and untrusted workloads at scale
• Design and implement platform APIs and Kubernetes controllers/operators, primarily in Go, that power workload lifecycle management, autoscaling, placement, and workload isolation for containers and serverless-style functions
• Partner with product and platform teams to shape and deliver the Secure Compute roadmap, enabling new customer-facing capabilities and internal platforms to build on a common compute substrate
• Lead high-impact initiatives in areas such as workload scheduling, failure and disruption handling, private and public networking architectures, deployment and rollout strategies, and fleet-wide resource management
• Drive technical design reviews and influence architectural decisions across teams, ensuring Secure Compute services are easy to adopt, secure by default, and aligned with broader platform objectives
• Mentor and develop engineers through technical leadership, design guidance, code reviews, pair programming, and the promotion of best practices for secure, reliable, and scalable platform development
• Own operational excellence for critical Secure Compute services, including availability, reliability, performance, service level objectives (SLOs), on-call operations, incident response, and disaster recovery
• This role can be performed remotely from anywhere within the United States

Requirements:

• • 10+ years of relevant experience delivering scalable backend, infrastructure or platform software in production
• • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• • Proven experience building and operating large-scale, highly available distributed systems
• • Self-starter with strong problem-solving skills and the ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment
• • Deep expertise in Kubernetes, including controller development, operator patterns, and preferably multi-region and multi-cluster architectures
• • Strong proficiency in Go, Scala, C++, or other statically typed programming languages, 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 management, identity and access management)
• • Hands-on experience with secure container runtimes and Linux internals (for example, Kata containers, Cloud Hypervisor, cgroups, namespaces, seccomp)
• • Experience troubleshooting and optimizing performance for containerized and virtualized workloads
• • Familiarity with gRPC, Protocol Buffers (Protobuf), and platform API design for service-to-service communication
• • Experience working with public cloud platforms and integrations, including AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure
• • Strong collaboration skills with a track record of partnering effectively across Product, SRE/Operations, Security, and Engineering teams
• • Demonstrated technical leadership and mentorship experience, including driving cross-functional alignment on architecture, strategy, and execution
• Master's Degree
• • Experience in one or more of the following domains: storage systems, computer orchestration, networking, security engineering, performance engineering
• • Familiarity with Kubernetes ecosystem technologies, including service meshes and modern cloud-native architectures
• • Contributions to open-source infrastructure or cloud platform projects