Staff Software Engineer I - Confluent Infrastructure

Introduction

At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You’ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM’s product and technology landscape. Here, you’ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. With Confluent, data doesn’t sit still. We put information in motion, streaming in near real time so organizations can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them.

Your role and responsibilities

About the Team:

The Secure Compute Team builds and operates the foudantional infrastructure layer that powers Confluent Cloud. Our Mission is to enable the safe execution of code and data processing in multi-tenant environments across AWS, Azure, and GCP ate scale. We provide the essential building blocks- Including isolation, identify, and networking- that empower both our customers and internal product teams to innovate without compromising security.

As Confluent's product portfolio expands, our team sits at the center of the company's growth. We own a polyglot, container-based runtime that operates across thousands of clusters globally, solving some of the most complex challenges in distributed systems and cloud-native architecture. By balancing world-class security with operational cost-efficiency, we ensure that Confluent Cloud remains the trusted platform for mission-critical workloads in even the most highly regulated industries.

About the Role:

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Secure Compute Platform team, you will be a key technical leader in building and evolving a next-generation, multi-tenant, cloud-native compute platform that safety runs both trusted and untrusted workloads at scale. Our platform is built on Kubernetes and runs across a large fleet of clusters in multiple public clouds, providing a unified abstraction layer for workload execution, lifecycle management, security, and operational excellence.

What You Will Do:

Define and drive the technical direction for Secure Compute, including platform architecture, runtime, and security for running trusted and untrusted workloads ate 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 bulid 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.

**This job can be performed from anywhere in the US.

Required technical and professional expertise

10+ years of relevant experience delivering scalable backend or infrastructure software in production. Education in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.

Experience in building and operating large-scale, high-availability systems. A self-starter with strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work in a fast-paced environment.

Deep expertise in Kubernetes, including controller development, operator patterns, and preferably multi-region or multi-cluster architectures.

Strong proficiency in Go, Scala, C++, or other statically typed languages, 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.

Experience with public cloud environments (such as AWS, GCP, Azure) and cloud-provider integrations.

Strong collaboration skills and history of working effectively with product, SRE/operations, security, and peer engineering teams. Demonstrated technical leadership and mentorship, including driving cross-team alignment on architecture and execution.

Preferred technical and professional experience

Experience in one or more of the following domains: storage, compute orchestration, networking, security, or performance engineering.

Familiarity with Kubernetes, service meshes, and cloud-native architectures.

Contributions to open-source infrastructure projects.

IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.