Confluent Staff Software Engineer II - Secure Compute

IBM is a technology company developing AI-powered, cloud-native software and hybrid cloud solutions. The Staff Software Engineer II will provide technical leadership for the Secure Compute Platform, designing and evolving secure, multi-tenant compute infrastructure built on Kubernetes across multiple public clouds. The role focuses on platform APIs, workload isolation, distributed systems, operational excellence, architecture, and mentoring.

Responsibilities:

• 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:

• Bachelor's Degree
• 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 management and identity management)
• Hands-on experience with secure container runtimes and low-level Linux internals (for example, Kata containers, Cloud Hypervisor, cgroups, namespaces and seccomp)
• Experience troubleshooting and optimizing performance for containerized and virtualized workloads
• Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, and internal platform API design for service-to-service communication
• Hands-on experience with observability and operational best practices (metrics, logging, distributed tracing, alerting, Service Level Objectives/SLOs, rollout strategies, incident response)
• Experience with public cloud environments, including AWS, GCP, and Azure, as well as cloud-provider integrations
• Demonstrated technical leadership and mentorship, including driving cross-team alignment on architecture, strategic direction, and execution
• This job can be performed from anywhere in the United States
• 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
• Some travel may be required based on business demand
• Master's Degree
• Strong collaboration skills and a demonstrated ability to work effectively with Product, SRE/Operations, Security, and Engineering teams
• A smart, humble, and empathetic approach, coupled with a strong sense of ownership, accountability, and teamwork
• Passion for building foundational cloud infrastructure and enthusiasm for working in a fast-paced, innovative environment