Software Engineer - Confluent Cloud Platform; United Kingdom

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.

Your role and responsibilities

About the Role:

As a Software Engineer, Cloud Control Plane, you will be designing and implementing a distributed control plane used by product teams to manage the lifecycle of their Confluent Cloud offerings.

We are a tightly knit group with a fairly mature Agile process running a very mild version of the XP playbook - we care a lot about clear communication, a good degree of task breakdown and a whole lot of pairing with other engineers. We pride ourselves in how we get stuff done - our process is light on red tape and heavy on collaboration - we will give you the authority and autonomy to make decisions.

What You Will Do:

• Delve deep into the Kubernetes framework - we have K8S contributors working with us internally
• Provision infrastructure using a mixture of Terraform and internal tooling and deploy your changes using Helm
• Thrive working iteratively in a fast-paced Scrum environment where you'll use our product and be very much Dev Ops driven
• You’ll be expected to not only ship code but also operate and support it before and after release - that includes having a deep understanding of what your code will run on

Required education

None

Preferred education

None

Required technical and professional expertise

• Strong software design and implementation skills in building infrastructure frameworks
• Experience with one or more of these programming languages - Go, C++, Java, or Python
• Experience in a full project lifecycle starting from zero lines of code to operating, observing and supporting a product as part of an on-call rota
• Solid understanding of Kubernetes and Docker

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Experience in building control planes (virtualization, software-defined networking/storage)
• Experience building APIs - both RESTful and gRPC-based
• Familiarity with infra such as networking, storage, and security in data centres
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes operators, Helm, or Stateful Sets
• Open source contributions to Kubernetes sigs or adjacent projects
• Experience with PBT, TDD, and pair programming.

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 data centres, 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…