Software Engineering Software Engineer - Confluent Infrastructure Professional

Job Title

Staff Software Engineer I – Confluent Infrastructure

Georgia, Minnesota, Texas, New York, North Carolina, Arizona, Washington, Massachusetts, California — United States

Regular full‑time; hybrid work arrangement; some travel may be required.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Secure Compute Platform team, you will lead the design and evolution of a next‑generation, multi‑tenant, cloud‑native compute platform that safely runs trusted and untrusted workloads  platform runs on Kubernetes across multiple public clouds and provides 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 at scale.
• Design and implement platform APIs and Kubernetes controllers/operators (primarily in Go) for workload lifecycle, autoscaling, placement, and isolation.
• 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.

• Minimum of 10+ years delivering scalable backend or infrastructure software in production; degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Experience building and operating large‑scale, high‑availability systems; strong problem‑solving skills and 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 for building production‑grade services and control planes.
• Experience with multi‑tenant platform architectures and security/isolation patterns (name spaces, network policies, sandboxing, secrets, identity management), hands‑on work with secure container runtimes and low‑level Linux internals, 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 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.
• Preferred:
  Experience in storage, compute orchestration, networking, security, or performance engineering; familiarity with Kubernetes, service meshes, and cloud‑native architectures; contributions to open‑source infrastructure projects.

Some travel may be required based on business demand.

• Healthcare benefits including medical, prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & wellness.
• Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short‑term and long‑term disability, and performance‑based incentive programs.
• Generous paid time off: 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave, and other paid care leave per IBM policy.
• Training and educational resources via an AI‑driven learning platform for…