Confluent - Staff Software Engineer II - Secure Compute

IBM; United States; Remoto; USD 180.000 - 240.000; Tempo integral

Resumo da vaga

IBM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Secure Compute Platform. You will lead the technical direction and build a multi-tenant, cloud-native compute substrate that safely runs trusted and untrusted workloads across public clouds.

You will design APIs, Kubernetes controllers, and runtime integrations, guiding cross-team initiatives and mentoring engineers toward secure, reliable, and scalable platform delivery. This role can be performed from anywhere in the United States.

Qualificações

• Minimum 10+ years delivering scalable backend or infrastructure software.
• Proven leadership delivering large-scale, highly available distributed systems.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes and Go.
• Experience with multi-tenant architectures and security/isolation patterns.
• Experience with AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Responsabilidades

• Define and drive technical direction for Secure Compute and platform security.
• Design and implement platform APIs and Kubernetes controllers/operators in Go.
• Partner with product teams to shape roadmaps for Secure Compute.
• Deliver initiatives in workload scheduling, networking, rollout, and capacity management.
• Lead design reviews and mentor engineers for secure, reliable platform development.
• Own operational excellence including availability, SLOs, and incident response.

Conhecimentos

Kubernetes

Go

Distributed systems

Multi-tenant security

Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)

Leadership & mentorship

Observability & SRE practices

Formação

Bachelor's Degree

Master's Degree

Descrição da vaga

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. With Confluent, data doesn’t sit still. We put information in motion, streaming in near real time so organizations can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them.

Your role and responsibilities

About the Team

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 at scale. We provide the essential building blocks, including isolation, identity, and networking, that empower both our customers and internal product teams to innovate without compromising security.

As Confluent's product portfolio expands, our team sits at the center of the company's growth. We own a polyglot, container-based runtime that operates across thousands of clusters globally, solving some of the most complex challenges in distributed systems and cloud-native architecture. By balancing world-class security with operational cost-efficiency, we ensure that Confluent Cloud remains the trusted platform for mission-critical workloads in even the most highly regulated industries.

About the Role

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 at scale. Our 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.

You'll work on critical systems including:

• Secure Compute Infrastructure - Build and evolve the secure, multi-tenant compute substrate and isolation primitives that safely execute customer and internal workloads in a shared environment
• Platform APIs & Abstractions - Design and evolve APIs that provide clear, safe abstractions for polyglot workloads (containers, functions, and services) with diverse performance and isolation needs
• Core Platform Integration - Integrate the Secure Compute platform with core data and application services so that teams can onboard new workloads with minimal friction
• Multi-Tenancy & Security - Implement and harden workload isolation, network policies, identity and access, and secure execution environments required to safely run customer-supplied code
• Observability & Operations - Drive operational excellence through rich observability, automated health checks, self-healing workflows, and robust rollout and rollback practices

As a senior technical leader, you think strategically and help drive end-to-end technical delivery, from platform APIs and developer experience down to runtime, capacity, and security. You leverage your expertise in cloud-native distributed systems to take the Secure Compute platform to the next level while ensuring high availability, reliability, security, and cost efficiency for mission-critical customer workloads.

What You Will Do

• 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

This job can be performed from anywhere in the United States.

Required education

Bachelor's Degree

Preferred education

Master's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

• 10+ years of experience delivering scalable backend or infrastructure software in production
• Proven track record of leading the delivery of large-scale, highly available, low-latency distributed systems
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes, including controller development, operator patterns, and preferably multi-region or multi-cluster architectures
• Strong proficiency in Go with experience building production-grade services and control planes
• Experience with multi-tenant platform architectures and security/isolation patterns (for example, namespaces, network policies, sandboxing, secrets management and identity management)
• Hands-on experience with secure container runtimes and low-level Linux internals (for example, Kata containers, Cloud Hypervisor, cgroups, namespaces and seccomp)
• Experience troubleshooting and optimizing performance for containerized and virtualized workloads
• Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, and internal platform API design for service-to-service communication
• Hands-on experience with observability and operational best practices (metrics, logging, distributed tracing, alerting, Service Level Objectives/SLOs, rollout strategies, incident response)
• Experience with public cloud environments, including AWS, GCP, and Azure, as well as cloud-provider integrations
• Demonstrated technical leadership and mentorship, including driving cross-team alignment on architecture, strategic direction, and execution

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Strong collaboration skills and a demonstrated ability to work effectively with Product, SRE/Operations, Security, and Engineering teams
• A smart, humble, and empathetic approach, coupled with a strong sense of ownership, accountability, and teamwork
• Passion for building foundational cloud infrastructure and enthusiasm for working in a fast-paced, innovative environment

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

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 for leveraging data, wherever it resides, to extend AI deep into a business.

YOUR LIFE @ IBM

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.

Are you ready to be an IBMer?

ABOUT IBM