Staff Software Engineer I - Confluent Cloud Platform

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.

We are looking for a staff level technical leader to help us build the next‑generation network data plane to enable our Confluent Cloud platform to achieve 10x the current scale. This is a hybrid engineering role, blending deep software development expertise with hands‑on operational excellence.

Cloud networking is a strategic investment area with significant potential to impact the company's growth. The Traffic team is responsible for the network platform of Confluent Cloud with a focus on performance, security, reliability, and cost optimizations for all network traffic that ingresses and egresses a customer's Kafka and DSP deployments as well as all internal service to service traffic on Confluent Cloud.

You will architect, design and lead cross‑team initiatives to deliver highly scalable, cost efficient, networking data plane solutions, while also ensuring these systems are reliable, observable, and resilient in production. You’ll work across engineering, security, product, and platform orgs to deliver building blocks that empower product teams to integrate networking seamlessly.

• Design, develop, and operationalize high-performance, scalable, reliable, and resilient systems for the Confluent Cloud network data plane platform.
• Independently drive the execution of ambiguously scoped cross-team software projects, ensuring the delivery of complex projects in production with a focus on quality.
• Leverage cloud providers to deliver impactful business solutions.
• Troubleshoot and improve operations for a complex technical stack that spans across AWS, Azure, and GCP, including microservices, containers, and virtualization.

None

None

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Extensive experience of the software engineering industry experience.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development.
• Experience in building and operating large-scale systems.
• Solid understanding of networking primitives and protocols.
• Self‑starter with the ability to work effectively in teams.
• Proficiency in C++, Go, Python, or other programming languages

• Experience with Kubernetes.
• Experience with network proxies and/or load balancers.
• Experience with public clouds (AWS, Azure, or GCP).

IBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence—from machine learning to generative AI to help make organizations more responsive, productive, and resilient. IBM Software helps clients put AI into action now to create real value with trust, speed, and confidence across digital labor, IT automation, application modernization, security, and sustainability. Critical to this is the ability to make use of all data, because AI is only as good as the data that fuels it.

In most organizations data is spread across multiple clouds, on premises, in private datacenters, and at the edge. IBM’s AI and data platform scales and accelerates the impact of AI with trusted data, and provides leading capabilities to train, tune and deploy AI across business. IBM’s hybrid cloud platform is one of the most comprehensive and consistent approach to development, security, and operations across hybrid environments—a flexible foundation…