Confluent Staff Software Engineer - Infrastructure

IBM develops AI-powered, cloud-native software and hybrid cloud solutions that help organizations transform their operations. The Staff Software Engineer will provide technical leadership in building and operating a secure, multi-tenant, Kubernetes-based compute platform across public clouds, focusing on platform APIs, workload management, security, reliability, and operational excellence.

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

Requirements:

• Bachelor's Degree
• 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
• 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
• This role can be performed remotely from anywhere within the United States
• Some travel may be required based on business demand
• 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
• Master's Degree
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes, including controller development, operator patterns, and preferably multi-region and multi-cluster architectures
• 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