Software Engineer - Confluent Infrastructure

Job Title

Staff Software Engineer I - Confluent Infrastructure

The Secure Compute Team builds and operates the foundational 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  provide the essential building blocks — isolation, identity, and networking — that empower our customers and internal product teams to innovate without compromising security.

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  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.

• 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.

Bachelor's Degree

Master's Degree

• 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 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 (e.g., name spaces, network policies, sandboxing, secrets, identity management), hands‑on work with secure container runtimes and low‑level Linux internals (e.g., Kata Containers, Cloud Hypervisor, cgroups, name spaces, 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 (AWS, GCP, Azure) and cloud‑provider integrations.
• Strong collaboration skills and a 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.