Staff Software Engineer: Cloud Control Plane Architect

IBM; Markham; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software is looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of a foundational control plane platform powering Confluent Cloud. You will own backend and distributed systems across multiple services, shaping architecture and reliability standards.

You’ll mentor engineers, drive cross-team initiatives, and define roadmaps with strong emphasis on observability and scalable design, collaborating with Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, and Security teams.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience in backend or distributed systems.
• Distributed systems & cloud expertise across AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Experience with Kubernetes or similar orchestration.
• Proficiency in Go, Java, or Scala across services.
• Architectural design and end-to-end execution discipline.
• Operational rigor with observability, SLOs, and incident response.
• Strong communication and cross-team leadership.
• Influenced technical direction beyond own scope.
• Customer-focused with reliability and long-term maintainability.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems.
• Lead open-ended technical initiatives across teams and services.
• Improve reliability with observability, SLOs, and safe rollout patterns.
• Collaborate with Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, and SRE.
• Mentor engineers and conduct design reviews.
• Improve developer experience for control-plane stack, CI/CD, testing.
• Define roadmaps and prioritize work aligned with goals.
• Contribute to engineering culture through docs and knowledge sharing.

Skills

Backend development

Distributed systems

Cloud platforms

Kubernetes

Go/Java/Scala

Architectural design

Observability & SRE

Cross-team leadership

Communication skills

Education

Master's Degree

Job description

IBM Software is looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of a foundational control plane platform powering Confluent Cloud. You will own backend and distributed systems across multiple services, shaping architecture and reliability standards.

You’ll mentor engineers, drive cross-team initiatives, and define roadmaps with strong emphasis on observability and scalable design, collaborating with Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, and Security teams.