[Remote] Staff Software Engineer I - Confluent Infrastructure

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. IBM Software transforms client challenges into innovative solutions, focusing on AI-powered, cloud-native products. The Staff Software Engineer will lead the development of a multi-tenant, cloud-native compute platform, ensuring secure execution of workloads and collaborating with various teams to enhance product offerings.

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

Skills

• 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
• Master's Degree
• 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

Company Overview

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