Staff Software Engineer I - Confluent Infrastructure

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 safely runs both trusted and untrusted workloads at scale.

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

This job can be performed from anywhere in the US.

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.
• 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.

Benefits

IBM offers a comprehensive benefits package including health insurance, retirement plans, and paid time off.

Pay

The salary range for this position is $150,000 - $200,000 annually, depending on experience and location.

Schedule

The role can be performed from anywhere in the US.