Cloud Network Data Plane Engineer — Scale & Performance

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

To realize Confluent’s enormous potential, we are looking for software engineers, at various levels, to grow our Traffic team which is responsible for building and managing the networking fabric of Confluent Cloud. Cloud networking is a strategic investment area for Confluent with the potential to impact the company’s top and bottom line. The data plane area in the Traffic team focuses on the performance, security, reliability, and cost optimizations for all traffic that ingresses and egresses a customer's Kafka cluster on Confluent Cloud.

We are looking for someone with an interest in building large-scale distributed systems, with a focus on building and managing network data planes for containerized workloads in the cloud. The ideal candidate would be passionate about network data plane performance, scale, cost optimizations, and building robust software.

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Build the software underpinning the mission-critical Confluent Cloud network data plane platform. You will play a crucial role in designing, developing and operationalizing high performance, scalable, reliable and resilient systems.

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Independently drive execution of software projects to deliver complex projects in production with a focus on quality.

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Build upon open source software to deliver business impact.

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Troubleshoot issues and improve ops for complex technical stack that spans all the 3 clouds and includes microservices, containers, and virtualization.

This job can be performed from anywhere in the US

Required technical and professional expertise

• BS, MS, or PhD in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience

• 5+ years of relevant cloud infrastructure/cloud networking experience

• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development

• Experience building and operating large-scale systems

• Solid understanding of basic systems operations (disk, network, operating systems, etc)

• A self-starter with the ability to work effectively in teams

• Proficiency in C++, Go, Python, or other statically typed languages

• Experience/knowledge with public clouds (AWS, Azure or GCP)

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Experience with Kubernetes Networking

• Experience with Envoy proxy

• Experience with Linux kernel networking, eBPF is a huge plus

• A Strong networking background combined with your software engineering experience

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.